Censorship as benefit for authors

People ask, how did creative artists get their livelihood before there was copyright. This means in Europe mostly 1870, in U.K. 1709. It is a good idea to mention that Mozart was a wealthy man and Rossini grew rich. Paying hire for musical scores was very often a better idea than outright plagiarism, because copying was expensive and time-wasting.

The success of symphonies and operas was phenomenal even after the French revolution made on end of the former noble patrons of composers. Possibly this was partly caused by the very good chances of making some serious money by hiring musical scores to he needed 50 – 100 performers. In any case this was the beginning of the heyday of Breitkopf & Härtel, real musical publishing business.

The early darling of printed scores was Beethoven, who had himself conducted his new symphony for the European dignitaries in the Vienna conference after the Napoleonic wars. The young contender was a Pole, Chopin, concentrated in publishing for the then new instrument, pianoforte.

In principle staging a play needed an official permission even in England. In most countries “imprimatur” of authorities was needed for most printed matter. This is the reason why so many French classical works were first published in Switzerland or Belgium. Already Voltaire and Rousseau used this short cut. In Finland part of the “Archipelago Gulag” was sold as copies printed in Sweden in Finnish in 1980ies.

In this country a docent of botany (Wainio) was the last censor (painoylihallituksen asiamies) before the Constitution of 1919. He was never forgiven.

Not forgetting the at least symbolically deep impression made by the clandestine, patriotic newspapers of 1916 – 1917 and the unpatriotic and still more clandestine publications of 1941-1944 we now know that the race of authorities and “leaks” is perpetual.

But one of the vehicles is copyright. There was no hope of getting paid for one’s works without official permits. In a corresponding way censorship was quite enough to quell plagiarism of native works. It might be surmised that the unbelievable flourishing of the Russian novel (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky) had quite much to do with politically trusted publishers. Noble ideas justified handling minor political issues. There was no copyright but the market was very good even for lowly writers.

And talking of surprising externalities of the copyright system we should add that to-day probably all but 1 percent of photos and videos seem to be published for free, mostly by “consumers” themselves.

Jukka Kemppinen