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Panel

Jacqueline Park

 

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Tadd Phillips
In the eighteenth century, unauthorized copies of William Hogarth's engravings were cutting severely into his profits. The copies sold for less than the originals, so many people bought them instead. For example, the original engravings of "A Harlot's Progress" cost a guinea (about twenty shillings), while copies sold for fifteen shillings. The originals of "A Midnight Modern Conversation" cost five shillings and the copies cost only one. For "A Rake's Progress," the gap was even larger; the originals were two guineas, or about 40 shillings, and the copies were 8 shillings. Hogarth and his colleagues felt that the prevalence of fakes and forgeries had a detrimental effect not only on their own profits, but on the advancement of art in England. They argued that their proposed act would remedy these ills, and that "when every one is secure of the Fruits of his own Labour, the Number of Artists will be every Day increasing."

Wiki Markup
The Hogarth Act protected the rights of the authors of engravings to sell their work for a period of fourteen years. Those who sold unauthorized copies were fined. According to Paulson's text, the act was quite successful in stopping piracy; he claims that "the only \[pirated prints made afterward\] that can be cited with certainty are Dublin copies." However, Paulson also claims that although the act helped stop piracy of the engravings of artists other than Hogarth, they did not benefit as much as him. Because their work was less popular, they could not sell directly to subscribers as Hogarth did, so they were still subject to the control of printsellers.

Copyright concerns are perhaps more relevant today than ever. With the Internet, people can easily exchange pirated copies of books, music, movies, and games. In some ways, the situation is worse than the one Hogarth and his contemporaries faced. While they were confronted with low-cost, low-quality competition from thieves, artists today watch helplessly as people are able to obtain high-quality copies of their work for free. In many cases, there is almost no difference between the original and the copies. Thus far, the legislative process has not kept up with technology, and many distributors of pirated content remain safe from prosecution by hosting their web sites in foreign countries. A new bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, aims to block access to such websites. The fate of the bill remains to be seen. It is interesting that artists today still struggle with the same problems that artists faced 300 years ago.

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Khrystyne Wilson

In modern times copyright laws are taken for granted as something so obvious and menial it can often be ignored, for example the contemporary problem of pirating music and films. The pirating warnings shown in movie theater previews is something often mocked. I am quite confident that if asked, almost one hundred percent of the students at Cornell, or any other university would say that have at one point downloaded a copy of a movie, or song for free. Although this idea of illegal copying may seem like an issue only brought about by current technological inventions, we can see that the artist William Hogarth struggled against the same problems contemporary music and film stars do. 

In Eighteenth Century Britain, Hogarth was an artist who produced artwork based on commissions requested by royals and aristocrats, as well as art depicting contemporary themes, such as the highly publicized murders by Sarah Malcolm, and the taxation of alcohol in the Gin Act of 1736. Through his precision and talent in multiple art forms, such as etchings, engravings and paintings, and the subject matter he depicted, Hogarth found himself with a large following. Due to these highly publicized pieces, Hogarth began to charge subscribers a decent amount of money for his original paintings, which many of his poorer fans, could not afford to pay.

By charging a guinea each for one of his original works of art, Hogarth limited his potential buyers to only those who could afford these prices, thereby leaving out his poorer audience. Because of this, many merchants realized the potential payoff they could receive by selling copies of his work, made by amateur artists, at a fraction of his original cost. 

Back in the late 1700's, artists were less equip to handle this type of forgery, thus there was little way to determine whether a piece of art was a very good copy, or the original, and why pay ten times as much for an original, when no one could tell the difference? This, coupled with the fact that merchants were also selling copies that were very poorly made, thus debilitating Hogarth's fame in the art world, caused him to petition Parliament to create a law by which the artists were protected from this problem of copying.

Hogarth mirrored his proposal for a copyright law after one that was already in place for authors. Parliament passed the law stating that no copies were allowed to be made of an author's original piece for 14 years after the artwork was made, and anyone found to be making copies would be punished by law. 

This, in theory seemed like a good plan, except for the fact that copiers could, after 14 years, begin to sell copies again. Also, this law posed a problem for Hogarth. As the law was announced to begin in a few weeks, Hogarth decided to save publishing his newest pieces until after the law was in place. This did not stop some crafty copiers, who would sneak into his studio and try to memorize his works, in order to paint copies of them to sell before the pieces even came out. Needless to say, these copies were not exact replicas.

It is interesting, and somewhat upsetting to see that the same issues that plagued artists in the 1700's are still relevant today. We still have not come up with a way to stomp out piracy of art, as it continually takes a new form with new inventions. Although copyright laws now, for the most part, protect artists creating tangible artwork, such as paintings, musicians, and film actors are struggling to find a way to end piracy of their work. 

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