Marxist-Lessigism
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2004/feature_hunter_nov
dec04.html
Computer users of the world have united behind Stanford law professor
Lawrence Lessig and what they're doing is much more important than his
critics realize.
By Dan Hunter
AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE, the crowd is mostly students, and maybe a few
professors and interested outsiders. It's a typical turnout for a public
lecture by a well-known law professor. But there is something different and
a little odd about this group. Swarthmore doesn't have a law school, so the
audience includes no young men in suits that still have the label attached,
and no young women with high-heeled shoes so new the soles aren't scuffed.
And there is something else, something funny about the T-shirts. Everywhere
you look, there are T-shirts with slogans, not logos. No "Tommy Hilfiger"
and "Ralph Lauren" here. Just shirts with references too obscure to parse.
What is "Downhill Battle"? Or "Grey Tuesday"? One kid has a shirt with the
picture of a skull and crossbones on it, and written boldly across it are
the words "Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry." Look closer, and
you'll see, in tiny type, "(And it's fun)."
A couple of students get up to introduce the speaker. They're nervous,
disorganized, and rambling. Now you notice the handmade signs: "Swarthmore
Coalition for the Digital Commons" is taped to the lectern, and "Free
Culture" is written on the wall. It starts to become clear. This isn't just
a lecture; it's a political rally. People start to shuffle; the students are
losing their audience as the garbled introductions continue. But when the
speaker gets up to start, the shuffling ends and there is a ripple of
excitement. He is Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor, known to this
crowd as Larry. Dressed in black and wearing a pair of spectacles that could
have been handed down by Ben Franklin, he waits until the crowd settles. And
finally, you get it. Outside, lightning is cracking, but the smell in the
air is not the ozone from the thunderstorm. It's the smell of revolution.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTYâ�1�2�1�2"I.P.," AS IT'S CALLEDâ�1�2�1�2revolves
around
three basic property interests granted by federal statute: copyrights,
patents, and trademarks. Copyrights cover expression by authors of various
sorts, including books, plays, music, and so on. Patents protect underlying
ideas of useful inventions and processes, such as a chemical reaction or an
inventive mechanical device. And trademarks cover business brands. For much
of the 20th century, these I.P. interests (and other close cousins such as
trade secrets, unfair competition, and celebrities' publicity rights) were
narrow and uncontroversial. Businesses in the industrial era cared about the
factory, the production line, and the land needed for them. But as the
modern era rolled on, the importance of industrial production waned. No
longer were heavy machinery and physical plants the predominant means of
production; no longer was physical inventory central to industry. In the
developed world, control over intangibles came to dominate the business
agenda, and so too the political agenda.
First introduced in the United States in 1790, copyright was limited in its
infancy to protecting musical, dramatic, literary, and artistic works for 28
years, and it was later broadened to encompass photography, video, and
software for a period often in excess of 100 years. Patent scope was
widened, first to include computer algorithms and then business
methodsâ�1�2�1�2including those such as Amazon.com's patent for one-click
online purchasesâ�1�2�1�2and then life itself. In 2000, companies including
Celera Genomics and Incyte started receiving patents on sequences of the
human genome. Trademarks too were set loose from their historical moorings.
Not only was the trademark term extended, but the prototypical application
of a physical brand to a physical product was no longer the limit of
trademark. The sound of the Harley-Davidson exhaust for motorcycles or a
distinctive color of dry cleaning pads was equally protected.
Though I.P. rights are private property there has long been some sense that
the public also has interests here. The concept of the public domain was
first advanced in 1896, when the Supreme Court noted that upon the
expiration of a patent the invention "fell into the public domain" and was
free for anyone to use. But over the decades that I.P. rose in importance,
the concept of the public domain was ignored, or defined at best in negative
terms. It was the carcass left over after the I.P. system had eaten its
fill.
Still, the seeds of the movement that Larry Lessig now leads blossomed. In
the late '70s, prompted by cases examining whether the heirs of Bela Lugosi
and Rudolph Valentino could control the current and future representations
of these dead actors, a young Duke University law professor named David
Lange attended an entertainment law symposium to present a paper on
celebrities' rights to their public image. Lange was surprised at the
distress of the screenwriters who attended his talk and who argued that
expanded publicity rights would reduce their ability to adapt, use, or
reimagine these characters and their histories. As Lange described it, "the
law of publicity was dispossessing individual creators in order to benefit
the interests of celebrities." From this epiphany, Lange recast the public
domain. Rather than the negative leftovers, he wrote in an influential
article 25 years ago, the public domain was a vital, affirmative entity, the
publicly accessible collection of knowledge, ideas, history, and expression
on which creators draw in order to make new works.
The movement in defense of the public domain soon started to grow. Academic
works in the '80s and '90s by law professors Jessica Litman at Wayne State
University, Wendy Gordon at Boston University, Pamela Samuelson at the
University of California at Berkeley, and James Boyle at Duke University
explored the public domain's importance. Then, with the 1998 introduction of
the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (or DMCA), the public woke up.
These statutes extended copyright terms, renewed copyrights on some works
that had already fallen into the public domain, and forbade cracking digital
locks on copyrighted material like DVDs. But they also motivated public
interest groups as never before. Before then, corporate interests lobbied
for I.P. expansion without much public comment. This changed overnight as
the acts were widely seen as driven entirely by corporate interests,
particularly Disney's fear that the first film featuring Mickey Mouse would
soon fall into the hands of the public. Unanticipated uses of the DMCA also
drew widespread attention. The first incident occurred when a Princeton
computer science professor was threatened with prosecution if he disclosed
research that he and his lab had performed in breaking a music encryption
system. Then a Russian student was arrested while presenting a conference
paper that demonstrated how he had cracked digitally encrypted electronic
books. By the time students at Swarthmore College were threatened in 2003
with a DMCA injunction against posting details of a potential e-voting
election scandal, the message was clear. The restrictions on speech, the
threat to research and inquiry, the quashing of dissent, the jailing of
researchersâ�1�2�1�2all of Lange's worst fears and then someâ�1�2�1�2were
now
being realized.
The consequent backlash came at a bad time for I.P. owners. The rise of
file-sharing systems threatened severe damage to the music and movie
industries, and perhaps television networks. And social reformers were
beginning to question other parts of I.P. For example, the patent system
came under attack for the damage it inflicted on developing countries that
had been strong-armed by the United States into adopting U.S.-style I.P.
laws. This led to an increase in I.P. enforcement around the world, but it
also demonstrated the clear injustices in forcing the poor to dance to the
I.P. tune of the rich. American pharmaceutical manufacturers were vilified
because they refused to provide drug therapies for HIV/AIDS in Africa for
less than their patent-monopoly-controlled price. All the claims that drug
manufacturers needed this monopoly to produce other important drugs rang
hollow with the millions of people in the developing world dying from AIDS
and their sympathizers.
Thus was the culture war joined. This is not a war between cultures, but a
war over cultureâ�1�2�1�2who owns it, who can use it in the future, and how
much it will cost. On one side are the I.P. owners, with the money and the
ear of government. Against them stand research and advocacy institutes, with
names like Creative Commons or the Center for the Public Domain, and
political action groups such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the
ACLU.
RECRUITING AND LEADING A BATTALION FOR THIS WAR is what Larry Lessig is
doing at Swarthmore on a wet night in April. He's talking about his new
book, Free Culture, in which he argues for scaling back the copyright
system. Lessig is a prodigy of the legal academy: Now 43, he earned a B.A.
in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania,
an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He
clerked for Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for
Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, and he was a professor at the
University of Chicago and Harvard Law Schools before Stanford lured him in a
competition with Yale and Harvard. His résumé lists four books and 61 law
review articles produced in his 15-year career as a legal academic. But not
everything he has touched has turned to gold. While he has written about
aspects of the Constitution dealing with subjects other than intellectual
property, the constitutionalists in the academy greet some of that work with
derision and even his admirers often consider him an extravagant
self-promoter.
With his dazzling academic record, fiery rhetoric, and prolific writing,
however, Lessig has become the most recognizable voice to articulate why it
was a bad idea to privatize the open environment of the Internet, and how
the expansion of I.P. threatens future innovation. Tonight he's lending
support to a student protest group, one formed by the students threatened
when they exposed the electronic voting scandal. Like other student groups,
this one is renouncing private I.P. interests, has the word "commons" in its
name, identifies with the I.P. have-nots, and invokes a class struggle.
Means of production, communal ownership, class struggle, students with
slogans on their shirts. Sounds like a Marxist revolution.
LIKE MANY OTHER I.P. REFORMERS, Lessig is routinely denounced as a
communist. The most recent such attack was by a high-profile technology
columnist named Stephen Manes. In several vitriolic attacks prompted by
Lessig's Free Culture, Manes described Lessig as "blustering" and
"bloviating," a "buffoon" and an "idiot," whose ideas ("droppings") were
"nuts" and "laughable." Manes contrasted Lessig's "radicalism" on copyright
policy with the stance of "responsible creators" like Walt Disney, and made
it clear that the sort of reform Lessig advocates is ideologically suspect
because it involves stealing property from copyright owners. Manes proposed
renaming Lessig's book, Freeloader Culture: A Manifesto for Stealing
Intellectual Property. The allusion to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's
Communist Manifesto is hard to miss.
Manes's attacks, though startling in their bile, are hardly surprising. He
is a columnist at Forbes, a magazine that urbanely styles itself as the
"Capitalist Tool." If any organ is going to spy Marxist leanings in the
intellectual property reform movement, it is this one. Manes is not the
first to sniff Marxism in I.P. reform proposals. A senior writer at the Ayn
Rand Institute accused Lessig of Marxism a number of years before,
suggesting that his efforts in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which
Lessig argued for overturning one of Congress's many recent copyright
extensions, were shameful and would lead to "cannibalism" of property
interests. Mouthpieces for high-profile I.P. owners such as Paramount
Pictures also smell "whiffs of Marxism" in the reformer's distaste for
corporate control of culture.
The Marxist slur is a simple rhetorical device that paints I.P. reformers as
both dangerous and willfully ignorant. Not only do they desire a Bolshevik
revolution, and probably a Stalinist purge, but these reformers don't
realize that the communists lost the Cold War. Yet this use of the "Marxist"
tag is shallow and empty.
When people such as Manes or those at the Ayn Rand Institute charge Lessig
with Marxism, they refer to two features of Marxist-Leninism: the rejection
of private property, and the civil uprising that Mikhail Bakunin and V.I.
Lenin said was necessary to move from capitalism to communism. The kind of
social reform of intellectual property proposed by Lessig doesn't involve
either of these elements. Lessig isn't some modern-day Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon claiming that "intellectual property is theft." His reform agenda
is the I.P. analog of the New Deal social welfarism that ameliorated the
worst excesses of capitalism, and rescued it from social disaster. It's the
recognition that private property systems function better if some limits are
placed upon the market. Even many of the most ardent capitalists have
learned the Marxian lesson that unrestrained free market capitalism creates
a permanent underclass that is much more likely to revolt and overthrow the
system. It's a better idea for the wealthy to provide a safety net for the
lumpenproletariat than to be the first up against the wall when the
revolution comes.
ON THE OTHER HAND, WHILE LESSIG'S PROPOSED I.P. REFORM stops well short of
the destruction of private property, it stirs a Marxian debate in a much
more interesting and crucial sense. For starters, it is clear that I.P.
reform is a conflict involving a significant class struggle. There are I.P.
haves and I.P. have-nots. And in a world where the means of production are
increasingly controlled by intellectual property, the dynamics exist for
significant conflict. But the majority of the I.P. have-nots are in the
developing world, which is why the globalization debate often involves
intellectual property. Any Marxist-Lessigist revolution therefore is likely
to be mediated through the cordon sanitaire of international trade, and
through the World Trade Organization. The prospect of I.P.-induced violence,
at least in the United States, is unlikely.
But more than this, I.P. reform arises out of a genuine Marxism, that of the
open source movement. Open source, or "copyleft," as the movement is often
called, involves the transfer of the means of cultural and creative
production from capital to the worker. It is usually thought to be limited
to computer software. The Linux operating system was created by thousands of
programmers and has been freely distributed on the understanding that others
might amend, fix, improve, and extend it. But while software might be the
paradigmatic example of open source, the revolution it promises reaches much
further. The widest-read and most influential newspaper in South Korea is
Ohmynews, whose motto is "Every Citizen is a Reporter." Ohmynews hires no
reporters, and relies wholly on individual contributions of news stories by
its readers. Another example is the Wikipedia, an open source, online
encyclopedia that is entirely written, edited, and rewritten by anyone who
cares to contribute to it. Even though there is no control
structureâ�1�2�1�2there are no editors, nor is there a
publisherâ�1�2�1�2it
rivals commercial encyclopedias in scope and quality of coverage. Or
consider the Distributed Proofreader's Project, a group of people who
volunteer to proofread and edit vast reams of scanned documents for
inclusion in Project Gutenberg, another open source initiative that puts
out-of-copyright books online.
Though Bill Gates recognizes Linux as a threat to Windows, it is easy to
miss the truly revolutionary nature of this type of cultural production. If
you give people the opportunity to create, they will do so, even without
economic incentives. The core justification for intellectual property
protection is that, without it, no one would have any reason to produce
cultural, creative content. They would undertake a rational calculus and go
off to become tax attorneys. But the dynamism of the open source movement
shows that this fundamental justification doesn't hold. Many people will
produce creative content even outside what we can think of as the capitalist
underpinnings of I.P. It's a small step to go from this to a Marxist
revolution: The open source movement promises to put the means of creative
production back in the hands of the people, not in the hands of those with
capital.
It is not an accident that open source and Marxist-Lessigist I.P. reform
have occurred at the same time, or that Lessig is a prominent advocate of
Linux. Open source software demonstrated that the "incentive justification"
for I.P. wasn't supported once you put the means of creative endeavor and
the means of dissemination in the hands of individuals, as the Internet has
done for many fields. So, when the DMCA and other corporate-controlled I.P.
expansions came about, programmers weaned on open source code no longer
bought the corporations' arguments that these new laws were necessary for
innovation and progress to continue. The I.P. reform movement began with
software, but it is moving into all types of cultural material: newspapers,
magazines, commentary, music, even movies. Given the experience we now have
with open source, this is not strange. A Marxist might suggest that it is
inevitable. What is unusual is how, in their rush to vilify
Marxist-Lessigism, I.P. owners and copyright apologists like Stephen Manes
miss the importance of open source, which, as the true creative workers'
revolution, threatens the core of their industries. While copyright and
patent reform might be the most visible aspect of the Marxist-Lessigist
revolution, it is the least significant.
IT'S STILL RAINING AT SWARTHMORE. Larry Lessig is explaining the importance
of the public domain as a source for future creativity, when a series of
thunderclaps shakes the auditorium. For a moment everybody stops. Lessig
jokes about the "black helicopters" of the I.P. owners, and people relax.
At the end of his presentation, student activists swamp him with requests
for guidance about what they should do next. They plot how to reverse the
enclosure of the public domain. If nothing else, these students are engaged
with the political process of intellectual property in a way that has never
been seen before. The expansion of I.P. has led to the creation of a
movement that is fascinating in two ways: It guarantees that the public will
have a voice in future I.P. policy making, and it has created a new kind of
student movement that is one of the more active political movements on
college campuses. There are no riots, but this movement promises a more
socially conscious intellectual property system, one achievable without
bloodshed.
But away from the zeal of the student activists, the real revolution is
taking place. None of the revolutionaries recognize themselves as
suchâ�1�2�1�2they're just open source programmers or "citizen journalists."
But they promise to upend the intellectual property system because they are
creating things for the sake of curiosity, or for the approbation of their
peers, or because it's fun. This revolution will just happen, as people take
up the means of production for themselvesâ�1�2�1�2and even if it won't be
televised, it will surely be reported in Ohmynews.
Back to Top
Dan Hunter teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
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