Willard, Walt, and Copyright

Last month, my copy of Word and Object split down the middle. This was not a surprise: according to the front matter, it was from a 1964 printing. Still it was an inconvenience, less for finishing the first reading than for proceeding on to a second.

The MIT Press website showed that the book is still in print; there is a newer edition with a foreword by one of Quine's students. The local bookstore said that it could order the book. I was a little surprised at the estimate of three to five business days, but also pleased. The store called within that time.

The volume surprised me by its colorful cover--the old printing had sober black and orange lettering on white--and by giving Willard Van Orman Quine only two of his initials. It surprised me yet more to open the book and find the 2013 copyright of Martino Publishing at the front of a copy of the MIT Press 1960 edition, apparently unaltered but for larger margins, and the omission of the MIT Press logo from a title page. However, last Wednesday was a very cold day here, and I did not wish to discuss this at length with the store and perhaps miss my bus.

In the tech world, long copyrights are much resented. Some of this I think is because tech companies regard copyrighted work as "content": revenue, in the world of YouTube, Facebook, etc., is for the content aggregator and presenter; the content producer (what one once called artist or writer) can live on kudos. Still, there are arguments to be made against very long copyrights.  In A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner makes an argument that the extension of British copyright in 1912 tended to arrest English taste in the early Victorian era. 

In any case, one will hear grumbling about works that under earlier American laws--before 1998 and before 1976--would long since have been in the public domain. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon,  the "Steamboat Willie" of 1928, remains under copyright through 2024. Walt Disney died in 1966, Willard Van Orman Quine in 2000. How it happens that a 1960 work by Quine can be reproduced by a third party while Disney works from the 1920s cannot, I don't know. Yet the book seems to have come from a reputable distributor.