When we reached out to Bob Spoo back in September, we didn’t expect a reply any time soon.  He’s a busy fella.  Law professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law, practicing attorney, legal advisor to the James Joyce Quarterly, and author of scholarly law review articles, he’s a got a lot on his plate.  So we were grateful to receive a near immediate reply from him expressing the same kind of bemused, excited interest that grips many of the visitors to our site.  We were even happier when he followed up his response with a copy of his latest law review article, personally signed with a note of celebration for the advent of our little undertaking.

That was back in October.  It took Rob a month to get the article to me (artists!) and me two months to read it (lawyers!), so we’re just getting to noting our thanks now.  If someone as busy as Bob Spoo can manage to reply to us so quickly, you’d think we could note our thanks in less than three months, wouldn’t you?

Bob Spoo, if you don’t know, is the author of an influential law review article published back in 1998 in the Yale Law Journal entitled Copyright Protectionism and Its Discontents– The Case of James Joyce’s Ulysses in America.  It spells out in some detail how the copyright to the 1922 version of Ulysses is in the public domain in the United States, in light of Joyce’s failure to follow the byzantine filing requirements of the U.S. Copyright Act as it existed in 1922.  Its insights and scholarship were an invaluable resource for us in conducting our own analysis in determining to use the ’22 edition for our project.  Prior to writing this article, Bob was a tenured professor of English at the University of Tulsa and a Joyce scholar.

Bob’s latest article, Ezra Pound’s Copyright Statue: Perpetual Rights and the Problem of Heirs, picks up in part where his Ulysses article left off, using an idiosyncratic copyright statute concocted by Ezra Pound to highlight some of the pressures that are bedevilling the copyright community today.  Pound, well before saying that “all modern statesmen are more or less scoundrels except Mussolini,”  published an essay in which he attempted to formulate a copyright system in which an artist’s rights in a work would last forever.  Pound’s trade-off for eternal copyrights was a concommittant compulsory license system, in which the copyright owners would be required to allow those who would publish their works to do so at a royalty of no more than 20% if the works fell out of print or, paradoxically, were “best seller” type books, selling over 100,000 copies.

Now, Pound was no legislator and his statute reflects it, leaving out important features such as how to handle derivative works and fair use.  Nor is it clear that his 20% royalty rate would make publishing the work worth it.  But Pound’s statute is interesting because it reveals the struggle that some of our greatest minds have had in trying to strike a balance between rewarding the creator (author, artist, sculptor, inventor, what have you) for his or her labors and ensuring that ideas and culture are widely disseminated.  It is an issue that we at Throwaway Horse are struggling with in providing this site for free, it is an issue that consumes right holders in traditional media as copyright terms seem to get extended every twenty years or so, and it is an issue that will continue to be important as “evolving media” continues to, well, evolve.

There are no easy answers.  We can take some comfort, however, from the fact that minds like Bob Spoo’s are on the case.