Copyright, Ghosts, Information

In 1985, Marianne Mele Hall, the chairman of the Copyright Royalty Tribunal, resigned after a controversy surrounding her role in writing Lawrence Hafstad’s book, Foundations of Sand (1982), which included several racist passages. Although at first she claimed to have been the co-author, when the scandal broke she tried to avoid the political controversy by describing her role as a ghost writer or an editor. While the effort was to no avail and she had to resign, it nevertheless prompted an interesting epistolary conversation between the information scientist, Eugene Garfield, and the sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton, about the differences between the two terms. This essay looks at that correspondence and situates it alongside the emergence of the information industry affecting copyright.