The power of the Motion Picture Association of America extends into Congress and other elected bodies, but who knew that the Hollywood lobbying group influenced the Boy Scouts of America to introduce a merit badge called "Copyright Respect"? According to Lewis Hyde of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, California Boy Scouts earn the badge by writing and performing "a skit about why copyright protection is important." And they might draw their ideas from things being taught in school. A 2000 California law compels public schools to teach "the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing."
As with most anything taught on an elementary level, reality is dangerously simplified into neat lesson plans. Using parts of someone else's film or music without permission is deemed theft, without regard to issues of public domain, fair use or the historical context in which copyright law developed. And naturally, kids aren't taught "the classic economic distinction between corporeal and incorporeal goods." Instead, they are told that ideas are private property, no different morally or legally than a house or a car.
In Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Hyde draws upon the past to make careful distinctions. The cyber anarchists bloviating about their limitless freedom to have everything for free are just as wrong as corporations claiming patents on the human genome. However, he dwells more on the offenses of the latter than the former. For example, agribusiness is punishing farmers for the ancient practice of saving seeds, essentially bullying them to not let nature take its course. In response, activists advocate "treating the great legacy of agricultural seeds as a common good." If the ground we stand on has inherent aspects that should be held in common, what of the arts and inventions of humanity?
Hyde finds ancient roots for the idea of treating knowledge as a commons. "The Logos is common to all," wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and most of the great religions have preserved some idea of God-given commons even as they became increasingly bound in ropes of secular copyright laws. The cross, crescent and menorah are not trademarked.
In our own time, free market ideology has warped the discussion over copyright. The sort of selfish windbags who think the founders of America granted unlimited ownership rights over everything from farmland to guns to intellectual property have never read the founders. Hyde has, and returns from the library with a much different conception of what Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin would think of actions by groups such as the MPAA. Jefferson might have condemned them in a lofty speech and Adams would have filed legal briefs. Having the keenest sense of humor among the fathers of our country, Franklin might have laughed.
The authors of the U.S. Constitution were on the same page when it came to copyrights: they believed them to be a monopoly granted by law to authors and inventors to promote the discovery of new ideas of all sortsartistic and scientific. But the monopoly must be of limited duration, just enough time for the author/inventor to reap a financial reward but not enough to maintain a perpetual stranglehold passed down to heirs and assignees over the generations. Why? Because while Adams recognized that each man should be "sovereign lord" of his property, he also thought that we cannot acquire "civic virtue" as citizens of a republic unless we engage in the public good. In the case of real estate, the founders' words were meant to inspire landowners to consider the social good attached to their property. For stakeholders in intellectual property, they built a clause into the Constitution calling for private property to become public domain after a term fixed by law.
In recent decades, the law has been fixed and fixed again in favor of copyright holders rather than the public. The march toward privatization has become the battle cry of the American Right, sweeping up many people who would profit much more from a society that respected degrees of common use or public ownership. Ultimately, only the rich and powerful can gather a good harvest from a world where everything, from the words we write to the genes in our ancestry, can be owned in perpetuity.
