What Italian Opera and Napoleon Tell Us About Copyrights and Creativity

As Napoleon's armies spread across Europe, they didn't just bring heavy cream sauces and artillery; Napoleonic rule also spread copyright law. To the resolved Bittorrentist, who finds copyrights both antiquated and despotic, that may seem appropriate, but it also provides an interesting case study for what the introduction of copyright law does to the arts.

The idea behind copyright law, at least as explained in the US Constitution, is "to promote the progress of science and useful Arts," by ensuring that people who write books or make art are compensated for their work. As the digital age wrought endless and effortless reproduction, the line between creativity building on work and unfairly taking it has blurred, and copyright laws have been rewritten according to the whims of Disney, people have questioned whether the copyrights are still accomplishing their stated purpose, or if they ever did.

Stanford researchers Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser found a window into a world-without-copyrights becoming a world-with-them by looking at what Napoleonic copyright laws did to Italian opera, and according to them, copyright laws did lead to better art, while copyright extensions—a contentious part of contemporary copyright debates—didn't.

In 1770, none of the eight Italian states that the researchers looked at offered copyright protections to composers. A theater's impresario functioned as a sort of proto-executive producer, who looked for an interesting story, acquired a libretto, and commissioned a composer to create the score. "Once the opera was complete, the composer transferred all performance rights for performing his music to theater and its impresario," the paper states, which allowed the theater to perform the opera whenever profitable, without further compensating the composer.

But the Napoleonic conquest of Lombardy and Venetia changed that, by introducing France's copyright law of 1793 to the Northern Italian states in 1801. Instead of the rights being retained by the impresario and the theater, the author and composers had exclusive rights to their work for their whole lifetime, plus a decade afterwards for their heirs. The introduction of this copyright law, the researchers argue, was a bel-canto-era boon for the art of opera.

From their paper:

Comparisons of changes in the number of new operas per state and year after 1801 in Lombardy and Venetia suggest that composers responded to the introduction of copyrights by increasing their production of new operas. Baseline regressions imply that Lombardy and Venetia produced 2.12 additional operas per year after 1801, compared with other Italian states that did not adopt copyrights

Relative to a mean of 1.41 operas per state and year across eight Italian states between 1780 and 1801, this implies a 150 percent increase in the number of new operas.

As copyright laws spread across what would become Italy, composers produced 2.68 more new operas per year in states with copyright laws than composers in states without copyright protection—a 121 percent increase above the mean.

The copyright-protected operas also proved more durable—meaning they were more likely to enter the annals of opera history, be performed more often, and be available as recordings today—than those written without the protection.

The study found that, after 1801, composers began migrating to Lombardy and Venetia and premiering operas there. "Between 1801 and 1821, 43 composers who were born outside of Lombardy premiered an opera in that state. Another 13 composers born outside of Venetia premiered an opera in Venetia," the study stated. "By comparison, all other Italian states together only saw premieres by 5 composers who were born outside the state premiered their first opera in other Italian states without copyrights."

The uneven spread of copyright across the Italian states provides an interesting test case. I asked Petra Moser, one of the study's co-authors about other factors that could have explained the uptick in new and durable operas.

"The political changes—an increase in nationalism, for example—affect all states but only states that came under Napoleonic rule got copyrights," Moser told me. The durability of music from the time period isn't unique to opera—it was just after Mozart died, as Beethoven's career is taking off, to cite two non-Italian examples. Still the uptick in the number of durable operas and opera in general is noticeable only in states with copyrights.

At the same time, the researchers didn't find any reason to extend copyrights for the composer's heirs.

"Extensions don't matter that much to composers as long as they have some basic protection," Moser said. "Basic protection is critical as it allows composers and authors to appropriate some of the financial returns from their artistic creation. But the additional benefits from copyright laws that extend monopoly rights long beyond the life time of the composer are negligible."

Maybe it all makes sense when viewed through operatic lens. For instance, the characters in La bohème didn't really create much durable work, given that they had to keep burning most of it for warmth.

Of course, there are still counterexamples to copyrights and creativity in the musical world, from Handel's shameless stealing from other composers in service of crafting the height of Baroque opera, to the sampling that made Paul's Boutique possible. But Napoleon's Italian campaign makes a case that grave-robbing, rather than pilfering from the living, is the way to go.