Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

the ridiculous, such as the following from the Chronicle of [supposedly] Higher Education: “Physical property, such as real estate, is a finite resource that operates as a zero sum [sic] game. And the laws regarding physical property treat it as such. Intellectual works are abstract concepts and do not naturally operate as zero sum [sic] games.”91

This business about zero-sum games is repeated as gospel in the documents of the anti-copyright movement, notably in the Lessig (“Wow!…I would have focused the attack in much the same way”92) wiki.93 Of course, property does not “operate” as a game or anything else, and intellectual works are not “concepts,” but that is beside the point. This off-kilter allusion fails to recognize the very nature of replicability that it is intended to address. According to the logic presented, if Arthur Miller opened Death of a Salesman on Broadway, because it is not physical property and not a “zero-sum game,” I could therefore justifiably rent a theater across the street and put on Death of a Salesman, charging less, because I would not have had to go through the trouble of writing it. In the same vein, nothing would be amiss were the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to sleep with Queen Victoria, because Prince Albert’s enjoyment would not be lessened—and, indeed in some quarters might conceivably be heightened—for the same reason that sexual pleasure, abstract in nature and wholly within the mind, is not a zero-sum game.

The inapplicability of this strain of game theory to the notion it supposedly clarifies or impeaches is stunning. Let us say someone opens a golf course. Some people pay to use it. Others sneak on to it without paying. What these solons are saying is that because the nonpayers don’t spoil the enjoyment of those who do pay, no harm results. But even if the nonpayers don’t tear up the fairways, and play at night so as not to crowd them, if the general rule is to sneak on and only a few people pay, very soon there will be no golf course for lack of revenue. Therein would lie the harm, both to the bankrupt golf course owners and to the general public with no more golf course. Queen Anne, with scepter and tassel, understood this quite readily three hundred years ago. Modern professors, paid to think, evidently cannot.

Just as I refer to the Chronicle of Higher Education (a publication that exhibits less intelligence than a Kleenex,™ see above) as the Chronicle of [supposedly] Higher Education, the anti-copyrightists frequently deride intellectual property as “so-called,” because, unlike, for example, acreage or a motorcycle, it is abstract. Therefore, in their view, it cannot be property and should not be treated as such. But what about money, stocks, partnerships, futures, derivatives? What about ownership of or interest in future assets that do not yet exist, promissory notes, a business’s good name or goodwill? Money, needless to say, is the crowning and mercurial abstraction of economic life. Coconuts, aircraft carriers, years of labor, compensation for bereavement, gold mines, thread, sex, trees, ice cream, islands, and horses, and sometimes nothing whatsoever, just a place holder, can all be secured and powerfully expressed in terms of money, which without any but a symbolic existence can submit to the most abstruse operations of mathematics and yet emerge as something that glows in men’s minds and women’s no less. Shall we nonetheless exempt money from the protections afforded property? And because by their very nature the work and product of the mind and spirit are abstract, replicable, and manipulable, shall we exempt these as well?

I remember, as a student, long ago, my shock at the frequent baseless speculations and childish inanities of certain venerable professors, a decided minority (then), who should have known more of life and had more common sense, but didn’t. I speak of those who flirted with burning the libraries and starting anew, who obviously leaned toward establishing dictatorships of the enlightened (them), who believed and stated that human nature could be summarized and understood in a handful of postulates, and who in the guise of high-minded philosophy pimped for the destructive and murderous principles of totalitarianism left and right. They are still at work today, laboring to make their psychoses normative, writing immense treatises on microscopic nonsense, advocating infanticide while agonizing over the use of toilet paper. They have groups and subgroups and legions of cross-eyed devotees. They feed on the inordinate and undigested enthusiasms of youth. They disguise appeals to self-interest as pleading for the public good. They shelter ceaseless streams of absurdities beneath the indispensable arc of academic freedom. And, the ground having been so torn up and made unstable by such extremists, others, who might otherwise be sober and responsible, have taken up the subject of copyright and come to many an absurd conclusion.

But what about the Founders and Jefferson, who can hardly be thus dismissed, and whom those people who are so dismissible claim as their own?

In regard to copyright, the Framers were ahead of their time, moving it into statutory law in advance of virtually every other nation. Their satisfaction with a fairly short term reflects the relative novelty of such protection, and that in their time virtually no one wrote for a living. When it would become possible to do so, largely because of the country’s economic expansion and copyright itself, more would be written, as we have seen, by orders of magnitude. In the eighteenth century, a lack of incentives and the slow pace and low volume of publication would have made a situation such as we have today difficult to imagine even for geniuses. Jefferson, with his lands, slaves, and offices, did not need copyright. Nor did virtually anyone else who wrote need it, as writing was largely an offshoot of being a gentleman, and not much of a living was to be made off writing anyway.

Which is not to say that they were not eager for the principle, which is why