Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

most of those who betray also keeps them from being demonstrative about their betrayal, and renders their movements carefully calibrated and tentative.

In relation to the question at hand, copyright and authorial rights, one can find people who wish to make a show of generosity by publicly sacrificing their interests. How good they are to refute the selfishness of their colleagues and join the common endeavor by working for free. Were there, however, a shrewdness meter attached to such putative Mother Teresas, the needle would whip against its sides as if Ben Hur were flogging his chariot horses. By writing in favor of copyright abolition and then publishing and selling under copyright, one gains fulsome praise from gullible idiots and sacrifices little except consistency. By issuing “free” CDs with attendant fanfare, one increases the gate at concerts that because of the pervasive theft of digital music have become for many musicians the chief source of revenue anyway.

And, then, public actions contrary to one’s interests are frequently suspect if only due to variations in scale. Were Warren Buffett to back up his conspicuous public advocacy of the estate tax by donating, let us say, 99 percent of his wealth not to a cause of his choosing but blindly, so that, as it would be with taxation it would be swallowed in the clueless maw of the treasury, his argument might appear to some to be so buttressed as to be unimpeachable. Should we not then follow his example, as we might (but don’t) follow the example of Albert Schweitzer or Saint Francis? That is, after all, where the pressure of suggestion lies. But it lies in more ways than one, for the scale of things makes a difference. The giving up of 99 percent of his wealth will leave the young Buffetts with a mere five hundred million dollars with which to battle the vicissitudes of life. (The same would apply to his partner in supporting the estate tax, Bill Gates’s father, who may not have to worry excessively about his children’s financial condition after he is gone.) Were we to follow such examples proportionately, however, most of our heirs would have only enough to buy a used Volkswagen or perhaps a few delirious nights at Kentucky Fried Chicken. To put it another way, Warren Buffet says, in effect, “For the sake of the public good, I am willing unselfishly to stand out in the rain, and you should join me.” Then you look at him, and you see that he’s a duck.

My sense is that writers who make a show of embracing the idea of the “Creative Commons” fall into a few gross categories. Either they have made their mark and have so much already that whatever they do in this regard will serve as an exercise of public relations that will generate more revenue; or, despairing of ever publishing a word or collecting a dime, they have nothing to lose; or they are at points in their careers where they need to look “good” or generate attention; or they are simply cowards who succumb to pressure and coercion. Of course, there may be some who actually are convinced, and are willing to sacrifice the structure and stability of American letters, the lives and interests of an admittedly small class of people like themselves, and their own families. I would not deny in people such as the few of this type a purity of motivation powerful enough to overcome fairness and equity. It does exist, and they are like the people near the head of a line who with noblesse oblige allow a straycomer to step in front of them, thus setting back by one place each of several hundred people behind them. But of this they seem unaware, because they are self-centered and so very delighted with what they take to be their own goodness, and because their backs are turned on those whom they do not see.

Blindness can be inborn, or result from a single stroke, or arise due to accumulating obstructions. In the case of the anti-copyright cultists, as in the case of cataracts, it is the accumulated obstructions that are to blame, specifically the many layers of mutually reinforcing error that, while here applied to the question of copyright, have a deep and devastating effect elsewhere. It really is alarming and disconcerting that those involved in what would be, were they not participating, an intellectual debate, are often unable to understand the sense and syntax of their own language.

Once again, the Chronicle of [supposedly] Higher Education, in reaction to the statement, “To the objection that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where Sylvia Plath’s inheritors berth their 200-foot yachts.” Missing the point that copyright protects mainly people of modest means, and that, therefore, Robin Hood-ism is not only unjustifiable but wide of the mark, they write, “A literature professor might also ask whether it’s more important for Sylvia Plath’s heirs to own yachts or for scholars and students to have unrestricted access to the poet’s works.”24

Of course, the choice is not between yachts for Sylvia Plath’s heirs and unrestricted access to her work for scholars and students. The choice is between access and unrestricted access. That is, between unrestricted access and the heirs having anything at all derived from the work. Though it is hard to imagine anyone so self-centered as to think himself entitled to the product of other people’s labor, here it is. A huge class of spoiled “intellectuals,” in a perfect example of what they call dependencia, disparages the bourgeois organs—business, the family, the state—that sustain them. Presumably the librarians and professors who call for the liberation of works from “monopolistic” copyright want to be paid, and would highly resent being carted off to, let us say, Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location, to work for nothing—food, shelter, and everything else not included. Would they ask the United Farm Workers to labor without pay so as to provide easier access to