Tag Archives: Intellectual property

Enabling Our Public Selves in a World of Maximal Copyright Control

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With the web aflame this week with talk about legislation that aims to the major media companies exert greater control over the content they helped create (or that they inherited, acquired, stole, depending on the case), I was inspired again by a vision from Lewis Hyde about the need for us to reframe the narrative from simply being one about people who create and own intellectual property to one where we think about ways that we can be and should be public selves and that we can also be individuals with intellectual property rights. The discussion today is too much framed around notions of individual property and not enough around the cultural commons that we historically have had in America. Over the years, that commons has been walled off in various ways (enclosed, much as land was enclosed in England beginning in the 1500s and mostly completed in the 1800s).

I was first introduced to Hyde’s ideas last year when I read his amazing book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. If you want to get an introduction to his thinking, this 14 January 2011 story on the radio show On the Media about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech delves deep into creativity, copyright, and the commons.

Here’s a pull quote from Hyde in the On the Media piece where he is talking about public selves:

I’m interested in collective being. I’m interested in making it easier for people to be public and social selves, as Martin Luther King certainly was. The risk is that if we turn everything into private property, it becomes harder and harder for us to have these common or collective selves, which is something we need. In anthropology, there’s an interesting resurrection of an old word, which is the word “dividual.” So we live in a nation that values individuality; we live in a nation of individuals. But a dividual person is somebody who’s imagined to contain within himself or herself the community that he or she lives in. So it would be nice if we began to have a better sense of how to own and circulate art and ideas, such that we could be present in our dividuality, as well as our individuality. 

Thomas Jefferson on Ideas as “Property”

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Nearly done with Lawrence Lessig’s Remix. In the final chapter, Lessig offers this great quote by Thomas Jefferson:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. (p. 290).

The full quote can be found in a letter Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813, and is reprinted in volume 6 of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905). The letter can also be found online on a site from the University of Chicago Press.

In Defense of Amateurism on the Web

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Here’s another quote from Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy that caught my attention:

Just as Jefferson romanticized the yeoman farmer working a small plot of land in an economy disciplined by hard work and careful planning, just as Sousa romanticized the amateur musician, I mean to romanticize the yeoman creator. In each case, the skeptic could argue that the product is often better produced elsewhere–that large farms are more efficient, or that filters on publishing mean published works are better. But in each case, the skeptic misses something critically important: how the discipline of the yeoman’s life changes him or her as a citizen. The Long Tail enables a wider range of people to speak. Whatever they say, that’s a very good thing. Speaking teaches the speaker even if it just makes noise. (p. 132)