Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

When the elders of the first family make their final bow, their descendants are left with the wealth they created and for which all of them exercised discipline and self-denial in their lifetimes. The elders of the second family leave nothing but debt. Where is the justice—assumed by the opponents of heritability—in rewarding the second family by confiscating the assets of the first?

And if one insists upon perceiving justice in this, why does it recommend itself only upon death? Why are the assets of the first family not taxed immediately, lest they give advantage to the children—in education and health, for example—before the demise of their parents? For that matter, what about the heritability of things other than money? Why not an equalization tax on height, strength, vigor, appearance, and musical or mathematical talent? If outcomes are to be engineered by evening legacies, what justifies selective enforcement?

Although the question of inheritance is separate from and immaterial to the question of copyright term, even were it not, copyright would by its nature fall into a somewhat different category. Most copyrights aren’t worth very much in monetary value, or if they prove to be, it is seldom initially apparent. Value is determined by demand that will undergo changes that cannot be foreseen. Although a few works will generate large royalties, the vast majority will be unproductive. What is at issue is mainly something other than money. In their febrile deliberations, copyright abolitionists focus on economics, but only touch upon the heart of the matter, and then only in reverse, when they protest what they call the author’s monopolistic right to control his own work, expressing their horror that, having inherited this control, the heirs to copyright might use it to distort or suppress the works that are their patrimony.

But the heirs are without doubt more apt to guard the integrity of these works than a vast number of people with less or no stake in them, emotional and otherwise, who, in the absence of copyright, can do what they wish. Without copyright at all, the author loses control of his work. Not just its revenues or disposition, but its substance. Better to leave the work in the hands of heirs the author has chosen because they have a connection and an obligation, than to expose it to a million geeks in airless basements who would rewrite Doctor Zhivago to make it more like “Dungeons and Dragons.” Why not allow any visitor to the National Gallery to tinker with the Raphaels? The opposition’s counter to this question is that whereas the Raphaels are unique originals, Zhivago, with a nature sufficiently abstract to be reproducible, can be run off in the billions. That’s just the point. No particular copy of it is inherently superior to another, which is why the integrity of each deserves protection equally, the very fact that brought copyright into existence in the first place. The copyright abolitionists, however, find this less compelling than the appeal of the false equality they champion.

They are often indistinguishable from the advocates of what both call the “Creative Commons,” a new movement with the fundamental premise that the work of the mind is for the most part the fruit of a vast, unchartable, often unconscious, collective progression. Commons is one of those words that, embraced by the commentariat, has spread too rapidly for its own good. During the 2006 Lebanon War, two expressions, “robust” and “disproportionate,” were repeated again and again as the press corps happily led itself by the nose. As for “commons,” a word popular in academia as part of a communal property philosophy given tremendous momentum by the music-sharing “crisis,” one can trace an example of its infectiousness by following the thread from, for example, Barry Posen’s essay, “Command of the Commons,” in the Harvard journal International Security,16 through various military publications, such as the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute—“A recent term of some consequence is the ‘strategic commons’”17—and even to the secretary of defense, who spoke of space and cyberspace in particular as the “global commons.”18

Creative Commons is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like a kibbutz on the internet, the idea is to write programs—“free ware”—and distribute them without charge. While presumably striking a blow at corporate giants like Microsoft, this demonstrates the generosity and selflessness of the programmer, musician, writer, or scholar who donates his work to the common weal. And it becomes in turn a premise that is promiscuously extended to those works the authors of which do not want to give them away, of whom the presumption becomes that they are not generous. Therefore, they are selfish. Therefore, they should be brought around, one way or another, to the ideal—for the public good and to save their souls.

What exactly is a commons? Webster’s defines it, inter alia, as “The legal right that arises either from a grant or a contract or from prescription or operation of a statute and that allows the taking of a profit in another’s land in common with the owner or in common with other persons.”19 Note “taking…another’s.” The “Creative Commons” is an invention of something that not only has not heretofore existed, but does not now exist and can never exist except as the manufactured justification of a hankering for appropriation. “Art is nothing if not a dream of the commons,”20 writes a publisher who makes money by publishing works in the public domain. (Not having to pay royalties means more profit either directly or from greater volume and market share as a result of being able to set a somewhat lower price.) But his role is irrelevant to his statement, which has no logically demonstrable meaning, as art is not created by collective dreaming. Not even D’Annunzio would have said such a thing, although Marinetti, a real piece of work, might very well have. Though the quotation is inchoate, it represents a now apparently widespread and deeply rooted notion.

It is an attempt to create a context for