My early 20s were, typically, the poetry years. I furiously scribbled love poems that I would then arrange on the page so that from afar the sheet of paper seemed to contain not a poem but a large question mark, or other such idiocies. I mention this not to rehumiliate myself but because during one of my first creative writing classes, the lovely and talented professor discussed copyright. Our work was, she rightly claimed, under copyright the moment that we put pen to paper.
Yours, mine, ours
A plea against modern notions of intellectual property rights and the decline of the commons of ideas
The connection between copyright and creation seemed natural at the time, but as Lewis Hyde’s commanding “Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership’’ eloquently argues, current copyright law and the regime of intellectual property rights are anything but natural, or even deeply historical. Intellectual property, Hyde argues, “is an idea not just new but historically strange. It belongs to our time, to be sure, but if we are to examine it with any care it helps to know how new it really is; it’s newer than automobiles, newer than light bulbs, newer than jazz.’’ Hyde argues that our current notions of intellectual rights threaten the integrity of civil society. In a culture where everything is demanded as a right, nothing is considered a duty.
Hyde writes that “[h]ow we imagine property is how we imagine ourselves,’’ but the obverse also obtains: How we imagine ourselves, as isolated, self-sufficient individuals, is how we imagine property. The equivalence between, say, a house as property and an idea as property has been naturalized over the past 50 years due in large part to the development of the knowledge economy, the rise of digital technology, and the fall of the Soviet Union — a final triumph for self-reliant capitalism. What suffers in this understanding of society is the concept of the commons, the “theater within which the life of the community is enacted and made evident.’’ The commons were, historically, the lands shared by a community, but Hyde invokes the term to speak of shared cultural, political, and historical creations and obligations.
Hyde grounds his argument in the founding days of the republic, effectively dismantling an erroneous narrative of the founding while simultaneously providing precedent for a change in our intellectual property culture. Benjamin Franklin furnishes Hyde with a deep historical counterexample to what he sees as a mania for expanding copyright and patent privileges. The Franklin of elementary school kitschtory is a genius who tamed electricity out of solitary, heroic effort. In fact, Franklin acknowledged his debt to his predecessors and collaborators, and as our “founding pirate’’ he was known to nick a few ideas on occasion.
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