Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

and proportion of the elements of a work of art, its subtle engineering, even its surface glosses, combine substance and style indistinguishably in a creation for which the right of property is natural and becoming.”

In Jefferson’s era 95 percent of the population drew its living from the land. “Writers and inventors were largely those who obtained their sustenance from their patrimony or their mills; their writings or improvements to craft were secondary. No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy. Now these are, and it is no more rational to deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks, and other forms of property in the eighteenth century.”

Nonetheless, one cannot ignore “the express order of the Constitution, long imprinted without catastrophe upon the fabric of our history. But given the grace of the Constitution it is not surprising to find the remedy within it, in the very words that prohibit the holding of patents or copyrights in perpetuity: for limited times.”

Here was the answer, brilliant, anticipatory, and judicious. “Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.”3

This was a simple and unambitious argument for the extension of the term of copyright based upon a more equitable, though hardly absolute, reconciliation of diverging treatments of different forms of property. There is obviously a public interest in the expiration of copyright, but there is also a public interest in copyright itself, and thus potentially in its extension. The question is one of degree. Although I did not state it directly (not being in the habit of negotiating with myself), my hope was that Congress, having not long ago extended the term so that in most cases it might benefit the original copyright holder’s children throughout most of their lives, would consider grandchildren as well, and perhaps even great-grandchildren, inasmuch as most owners of other forms of property are allowed theoretically to extend their bequests into eternity. Were I to die next week, one of my own children’s children born ten years from now would see the inherited copyright pass into the public domain when she reached my age, whereas the hypothetical grandchild of my hypothetical neighbor, whose legacy was not a bunch of copyrights but, for example, a hotel, could be confident that it would remain in her possession. One may quarrel with the idea or effects of inheritance, but whatever the final disposition it is immaterial to the imbalance here addressed.

When the piece was published, it appeared to have been one of those ghostly columns that pass entirely without notice and in which no one even wraps fish. I filed it and went on to the next thing. But as the state of Virginia passed from a Martian-ice-cap spring to a boiling Venusian May, and as I worried about the first cutting of the hay, an electronic storm began to take shape. Because I look at a computer screen as little as possible, I was unaware of the tempest as it mounted. Within ten days or so, the copyright article had generated (as chronicled by Google) what Churchill called “million-tongued propaganda.”4 In this case, three-quarters of a million “hits,” not a single one of which, in my wide sampling, was favorable. And to say that they were unfavorable would be like saying that someone had a touch of Ebola fever. Their language was angry, inflammatory, imprecise, and, shall we say—“Screw you, Helprin!”5—sometimes immoderate, although to their credit not as violent, obscene, and vengeful as it often is on the internet in regard to purely political questions, in which they so often confirm the observation of the First Earl of Oxford that “hatred, the more groundless and unreasonable it is, the more durable and violent it most times proves.”6 When a million tongues suddenly wag in unison happy with indignation and the joy of attack, the very nature of this tends to impeach whatever cause they espouse. A mob may be right, but, even when it is, it discredits that right.

Unlike the troublesome and annoying classical nudniks of the past, the electronic nudnik is sheltered by anonymity, his acts amplified by an almost inconceivable multiplication and instantaneousness of transmission. This new nudnik is therefore tempted to exchange his previous protective innocence (think Alfred E. Neuman) for a certain sinister, angry, off-the-rails quality (think the Unabomber) which is perhaps to be expected from the kind of person who has spent forty thousand hours reflexively committing video-game mass murder and then encounters an argument with which he finds himself in disagreement.

It is not merely training that has unleashed this keypeck ferocity, but also changes in certain fundamental conditions. In the electronic media’s dissolution of barriers—time, space, isolation—and in the vast expansion of received (or, at least, receivable) information, we have become in proportion infinitely smaller. Were you to have lived next door to Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century you would have been one of only a few hundred. Every time a ferry sank in the Philippines or a bank was robbed in Kansas or Italy, you would not know, as you do today. Or if you did, the knowledge would come later, briefly, controllably, in a small printed dispatch with neither sound nor color. You would not have felt as if you were merely one in six-and-a-half or seven