The history of copyright law is not on the top of most people's beach read hierarchies, but Lewis Hyde's newest book, "Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership," chronicles copyright development in a way that's both gripping and accessible. With the help of the Founding Fathers — heavy on the Franklin, who gets his very own chapter — as well as a series of modern−day cases of copyright exploitation, Hyde makes a compelling case for a cultural commons within our copyright−happy society.
He presents the idea not as a radical, new one but as a return to the way things were, shedding light on the complicated fact that intellectual property is not — as is it is so easy to believe — a tenet of our civilization, but rather an aberration from a long−standing Western tradition of a shared commons — a history Americans mysteriously seem not to remember.
But how can we remember, Hyde asks, when those who stand to profit from status quo copyright laws — read: the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — in partnership with the federal government, take strides to overwrite history with copyright as though it were the 11th commandment?
The current generation's classrooms have altered their rhetoric from sharing means caring to sharing means stealing, Hyde argues. Since 2006, California teachers have been required to educate students about the hazards of peer−to−peer file sharing, although they aren't required to review any of its potentially positive uses.
Meanwhile, outside of the classroom, Boy Scouts are awarded "Respect Copyright" badges for demonstrating an understanding that people who download media illegally are sabotaging the honest hard work of actors, musicians and producers. We are trained to believe that what is legal is natural and what is profitable is ethically correct, Hyde writes.
Perhaps Hyde's most successful accomplishment in "Common as Air" is his delicate rebuttal to machines like the MPAA. His most convincing demonstration of the overlooked artificiality of intellectual property comes in the form of a sample of its misuses, which he chooses carefully and to effect: Thanks to copyright law, the U.S. government cannot cap prices for an AIDS medication in Thailand which is costing local victims more than their annual incomes; farmers in the U.S. who purchase genetically modified seeds are required to disregard the seeds' natural reproductive abilities and buy them anew each year; anyone who has requested permission to reprint text by James Joyce knows that the tightfisted heirs to his estate seem to want — more than any high school student assigned to read "Finnegans Wake" (1939) — the Irish master's work to fall into cultural oblivion. The examples are plentiful.
Hyde's manifesto is not flawless, though, and his largest problem is simultaneously his second greatest feat. Hyde calls upon the 18th−century philosophers, including some of our Founding Fathers, to prove that a primary intent of original property rights was to preserve what was held in common, not to eradicate it — an idea held dear by the first copyright statute in 1710, but which dates back to the Commons of feudal England. Hyde convincingly argues that these philosophers anticipated nothing of the stringent intellectual property laws we've since derived from them.
But in doing so, he also proves their irrelevance to a modern−day issue surrounding technological complexities they couldn't have imagined and thereby undoes his own argument. It is anachronistic for a book that concerns itself with peer−to−peer file sharing and the Human Genome Project to build its argument on a set of murky quotations from the authors of our Constitution and to feature as its protagonist Benjamin Franklin, who theorized about property long before Al Gore ever dreamt about the Internet.
A more frustrating shortcoming, though in no way unique to his work, is that Hyde's argument is descriptive rather than prescriptive. He presents a thorough account of copyright history and rages, tactfully, against its manipulative power, but he never quite gets around to the part of his argument that deals with what comes next. Instead, he leaves readers to craft any semblance of hope for feasible policy change or come to terms with a perpetual standstill.
Hyde's argument is an important, if incomplete, one for anyone who is to become, as he puts it, a cultural citizen. At best, his book is the access key to the complicated legal discussion of copyright. At worst, it's a hotbed for dinner party conversations; even if his thread of quotations and tangents does not manage to educate you into a political stand, they are thought−provoking enough in their own right. Borrow a copy — he won't mind.
