DAVID SUTTON TALK (3rd October 2005)
Keeping WATCH: talk to the Biographers Club
Good afternoon. My name is David Sutton, and I’m a copyright person. I was born in the year 1950, and if all goes according to plan I intend to die in the year 2034. This would mean that all the words in my talk today will remain copyright-protected until 31 December 2104. So take notes of what I say by all means, but be aware that if anyone tries to publish my words – even in 90 years’ time – they will run the risk of being sued by my avenging unborn grandchildren.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of copyright.
There have always been two opposing strands running through the history of copyright. On the one hand there is the Anglo-American notion of copy-right, a property right based on control over the making of copies; and on the other hand there is the philosophical French notion of droits d’auteur, the inherent rights of the intellectual creator of a work of art, or a passage of writing, or any other original creation.
If we think back to the times of Shakespeare, we remember that the reliable “second quarto” of Hamlet was produced as a response because someone had come into the theatre and speed-copied Shakespeare’s words as the “bad quarto”. But what is striking about these activities is that Shakespeare himself was uninvolved. His play had become the property of the theatre-owner, and it was the theatre-owner’s property rights which were being defended by the second quarto.
Over the years, over the centuries, British authors from Daniel Defoe to William Wordsworth championed, in a Frenchifying way, the notion of authors’ rights, and there was some nodding in that direction in British copyright law from 1710 onwards. But the real change, the real triumph of the French approach 1, came with the international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention of 1886.
The British and the Americans were somewhat slow to accept the defeat for their traditions which Berne represented, but the British eventually implemented Berne from 1912 and the Americans from, well, from 1977.
The Berne Convention is most remembered for its introduction of a copyright period extended to a minimum of 50 years after the death of the author, but its true impact is much greater than that.
So what changed in the UK from 1912, when we adopted Berne? Well, first, we had to agree to a 50-year post mortem copyright period (which was to last from 1912 until 1996), but more fundamentally 1912 saw the end of copyright registration at Stationers Hall. From 1912 we had to come to terms with the idea of copyright as an automatic right which came into existence as soon as the pen touched the paper, or the brush the canvass, or the finger the keyboard – without any need for registration.
This no doubt appeared to be good news for authors. Rights automatically protected; no need to record one’s works in the ledgers of Stationers Hall, and so on. But what about biographers, anthologists, critics and other scholars? How would they obtain the permissions they need in order to obtain to publish their works?
No thought had been given to this problem, in truth. By the end of World War I, the old ledgers in Stationers Hall were out of date and useless, and from then on there was a huge void in the provision of reference information for scholars: there was no sure way of ascertaining the identity (let alone the address) of copyright holders for any author or artist. Biographers and others just had to do the best they could, on their own.
This lamentable position continued for about 75 years before, on the same principal as London buses, two copyright projects emerged at the same time – one based in Texas and one based in Reading. Both arose from within the community of archivists and librarians in the respective countries, and within a few months of discovering each other we decided to merge, and to hunt down copyright holders together. We became WATCH.
WATCH is now the world’s primary source of information about who holds the copyright in any individual’s creative works. It is a nice friendly acronym. Standing originally for Writers And Their Copyright Holders, it was upgraded painlessly to Writers, Artists & Their Copyright Holders some years ago at the behest of art librarians in the USA and the UK. In the mythology of the WATCH project, its acronym was dreamed up in a rooftop wine bar under the stars of Santa Fe, New Mexico in the Spring of 1994, but I can no longer remember whether there is any truth in this.
In 1996 WATCH became one of the earliest public information websites, and probably the very first to be a joint US-UK project. The web address has changed over the years, but has always been reachable by way of www.watch-file.com.
The first name-list of authors to be included was provided by a Reading-based parent project called the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters. This underlined the literary and archival nature of the original WATCH file. But very early we established a principle of never refusing to include copyright information which was notified to us, even if it was not very literary, not very archival, or not very British.
The starting-points for our research were informal (often handwritten) sources in the major research libraries. Libraries including the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Wales, and the Henry E. Huntington Library in California made their records available to us as our research began.
The biggest file of all was in the University of Texas. They had records of the copyright holders of up to 1000 authors, mostly literary and mostly British, and by the middle of 1994 they had written permissions to include details on over 700 of these copyright holders in our database. WATCH was under way.
The British end of the project was enthusiastically supported by the Society of Authors and the British Library, and attracted funding from the Strachey Trust, the Arts Council, the Royal Literary Fund, the British Academy and a number of private charities, including the Pilgrim Trust, the Chase Charity and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Beginning as library-based research, our working practices came to resemble more and more the activities of private detectives. The WATCH gumshoes trawled through wills and family trees in pursuit of heirs. We importuned publishers and literary agents, universities and collecting societies, Oxbridge colleges, and even people with the same name as one of our authors. We read through poetry journals and especially obituaries. We wrote to biographers and fellow poets and friends and acquaintances. We thumbed telephone directories and electoral registers, and we made extensive use of a website which is both hugely inclusive and hugely intrusive: www.192.com. Inevitably, we have become devoted Googlers.
The WATCH file grew until most of the major names of English literature were there, together with quite a few French authors, some artists and photographers, and some politicians and public figures. It had become clear that there was no other project anywhere in the world providing this sort of service, and we were thinking about expanding our remit. By 2003, there were over 6000 individuals and their copyright contacts listed in WATCH.
In September 2003 the WATCH file was “re-launched” at an event hosted in the British Library. The occasion of the re-launch was the rebuilding of the website using Microsoft Outlook (the 1996 software had become very tired and vulnerable), but it also led us to think about where WATCH should go next. The file had been created as a service to archival and literary scholars, but it was now clear that it had become the primary source for almost all copyright holder enquiries. We felt that we should accept and welcome this, and expand fully into the areas of “popular culture”, fine art, European literature, and also “prominent people”, whose copyrights we had been including on an occasional basis.
Some of our original supporters were somewhat startled to see the copyright details of Jimi Hendrix, Britney Spears, Frankie Dettori and Damon Hill start to appear alongside those of Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden, but most users welcomed our continuing expansion.
We have been very aware of the incomplete coverage of WATCH until recently in respect of artists, sculptors and photographers. It was therefore especially pleasing to be invited in 2005 to participate in an initiative by the Museums Copyright Group to expand access to information about artists’ copyrights. The MCG had thought about creating their own website for this purpose, but after a series of meetings decided to work through WATCH.
Since that decision was taken, WATCH has been able to include many artists whose copyright details are held in the files of the National Portrait Gallery. We have also benefited from close cooperation with the Bridgeman Art Library in London and the Visual Arts & Galleries Association in New York, and have started work on artists who are represented by the Design & Artists Copyright Society in London and the Artists Rights Society in New York. Our coverage of copyright in the fine arts has really moved forward this year, and the total number of authors and artists in WATCH is now almost 12,000.
It is certainly more difficult to raise funds for a project which has been running for eleven years than for a new project. For that reason, commitments to future funding by the British Academy (which has designated WATCH an Academy Research Project) and the Strachey Trust are especially important. Our working relationship with the trustees of the Strachey Trust, in particular, has developed from that of funder and funded into a set of good friendships.
The first thing that will be achieved by these future financial commitments is an assurance of continuity and updating of the WATCH file. There will continue to be an office in Reading University Library offering copyright advice and able to help with particular copyright problems.
We have some new research ideas as well.
Publishing and literary organisations – publishing houses, literary agencies, and little magazines – which have gone out of business and disappeared from view are notoriously difficult to track. Both in Austin and in Reading, this has long been a primary area of concern. We are now preparing to start work on creating an addition to WATCH, which we have decided to call FOB (Firms Out of Business). This will be a separate file accessible from the WATCH home page, and will grow with information both researched in Reading and supplied by “friends of WATCH”. Information from members of the Biographers Club, will, of course, be welcome.
The Universities of Texas and Reading are fully committed to maintaining WATCH well into the future, and supporting both the expansion of its international role and its participation in new and related areas of research. Provided that some continuing external funding can be found, beyond the annual support of the Strachey Trust and the British Academy, there will clearly, for years to come, be plenty of work to keep WATCH ticking.
