The Public Domain Part 19

Yet the chain of borrowing that links The Legendary K.O., Kanye West, Ray Charles, and the Bailey Gospel Singers is of a different kind. This borrowing involves taking chunks of prior musicians' melodies, their words, their lyrical patterns. This is not just copying the genre. It is copying the lines of the song within the genre. This is the kind of stuff copyright is supposed to regulate even when it is working well. And yet, listening to the sequence, it is hard to deny that at each stage something artistic and innovative, something remarkable, has been created. In fact, the story of this song is the striking ability of each set of artists to impose their own sound, temperament, spirituality, humor, vision of women, or, in the case of The Legendary K.O., their intense and profane political anger, onto the musical phrases they have in common.

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The postmodern conclusion here is "there is nothing new under the sun"--that all creation is re-creation, that there is no such thing as originality, merely endless imitation. If this is meant to be a comment about how things get created, at least in music, I think there is some truth to it. But if it is a claim about aesthetic worth, a denial that there are more and less creative individuals in the arts, I find it as facile and unconvincing as its romantic authorial opposite.

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What is fascinating about the artists I describe here is that, while they do not fit neatly into either the aesthetic ideal of independent creation or the legal model for how creative expression gets made, they each have a remarkable, palpable creativity. Each leaves us with something new, even if formed partly from the fragments of the past. One could describe Ray Charles as the merest plagiarist--making "search and replace"

songs by subst.i.tuting a woman for the deity in already- established hits. But if that is our conclusion, it merely proves that our theories of aesthetics are poorer than the creativity they seek to describe. So much the worse for the theories.

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As Jefferson pointed out, the lines surrounding intellectual property are hard to draw--something the Bridgeport court got right. When we draw them, whether legally or as a matter of aesthetic morality, we do so partly with standard instances in mind. "Well, that can't be wrong," we think to ourselves, and reason by a.n.a.logy accordingly. Yet the process of a.n.a.logy fails us sometimes, because the types of borrowing change over time.

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Ray Charles was frank about the way he copied the style and licks of Nat King Cole like an apprentice learning from a lawyer. But he and his estate a.s.siduously guarded his copyrights against more modern borrowing they found to be inappropriate.

Judge Duffy thunderously denounces Biz Markie. It is harder to imagine him leveling the same condemnation at Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Ives, Oscar Peterson, or, for that matter, Beethoven, though all of them made copious use of the works of others in their own. It is bizarre to imagine a Bridgeport-like rule being extended to composition copyrights and applied to music such as jazz. "Get a license or do not solo"? I think not. Does it make any more sense for sampling?

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If there is a single reason I told the story of these songs it is this: to most of us, certainly to me, the idea that copyright encourages creativity and discourages the reuse of material created by others seems reasonable. Of course, I would want to apply the correctives implied by the Jefferson Warning--to make sure the rights were as short and as narrow as possible. But at least when it comes to copying chunks of expression still covered by copyright, our intuitions are to encourage people to create "their own work," rather than to rely on remix. What does that mean in the world of music? As the story I have told here seems to ill.u.s.trate, even musicians of unquestioned "originality," even those who can make a claim to having created a new musical genre, sometimes did so by a process rather more like collage than creation out of nothing, taking chunks of existing work that were proven to work well and setting them in a new context or frame.

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Imagine Ray Charles trying to create "I Got a Woman" today. Both of his possible sources would be strongly and automatically protected by copyright. The industries in which those works were produced would be much more legalistic and infinitely more litigious. The owners of those copyrights could use them to stop him from "desecrating their work"--which is literally what he is doing. We know Clara Ward objected to Charles's other borrowings from gospel. I cannot imagine Will Lamartine Thompson or his worthy neighbors in East Liverpool looking kindly on the sweet "early morning loving" outside of wedlock described in "I Got a Woman," still less the use of sacred music to glorify it. And copyright gives them the power to say no. Remember Macaulay's description of how Richardson's novels might have been censored by a moralistic heir? Even if the objections were not vetoes, but simple demands for payment, would we get "I Got a Woman" and "This Little Girl of Mine"? Given the extent of the borrowing that jump-started this particular genre-bridging effort, would we be likely to see the birth of soul music?

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Congress a.s.sures us that the many increases in copyright protection have been in the name of encouraging creativity. The music industry says the same thing when its pettifogging clearance procedures and permission culture are criticized. But do we really think we are more likely to get a twenty-first- century Ray Charles, or a fusion of styles to create a new genre, in the world we have made? Do we really think that the formalist ignorance of Judge Duffy or the market optimism of the Bridgeport court, in which thick markets offer fungible sets of samples to be traded like commodities, are good guides for the future of music? Are we in fact killing musical creativity with the rules that are supposed to defend it?

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An Internet optimist would tell us that is precisely the point.

True, because of the errors described in the chapter on the Jefferson Warning, and the mistakes catalogued in the chapters on the Internet Threat and the Farmers' Tale, we have dramatically expanded the scope, length, and power of the rights that are supposed to shape our creative culture. But technology cures all. Look at The Legendary K.O., The Black Lantern, or Franklin Lopez. They are all probably breaking the law as it is currently interpreted by the courts. But their work can be created for pennies and distributed to millions. The technology allows people to circ.u.mvent the law. Admittedly, some of the copyright holders will police their rights a.s.siduously--think of JibJab's newfound dislike of fair use and their power to alter The Black Lantern's video. But others either cannot or will not.

Kanye West's representatives in particular are unlikely to be stupid enough to sue The Legendary K.O. in the first place.

Internet distribution becomes a demimonde in which the rules of the rest of the society either cannot or will not be enforced.

Art gets its breathing room, not from legal exceptions, but from technological enforcement difficulties. Finally, as more and more people can create and distribute digital culture, they are less likely to understand, believe in, or accept rules that are strongly at variance with their aesthetic and moral a.s.sumptions.

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There is a lot to these points. The technology does transform the conditions of creativity, and sometimes it runs right over the law in the process. Thousands, even millions, can be reached outside of conventional distribution channels with work that is technically illegal. And att.i.tudes toward creative propriety do not track legal rules. When I wrote to Mr. Randle and Mr.

Nickerson, I found that they realized Mr. West probably had a legal right to get their work taken down, but they felt he would not use it, and they had a very commonsensical conception of what they ought to be allowed to do. They were not making any money from this. They were making a political point, drawing attention to a political and human problem. That made it okay.

They would have liked more formal permission so that they could actually distribute CDs through conventional for-profit channels, perhaps with some portion of the proceeds going to disaster relief, but they understood they were unlikely to get it.

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Despite all this, I am uncomfortable with the argument "do not worry, technology will allow us to evade the rules where they are stupid." A system that can only function well through repeated lawbreaking is an unstable and dangerous one. It breeds a lack of respect for the law in those who should be its greatest supporters and beneficiaries. It blurs civil disobedience and plain old lawbreaking. Sitting in on the segregated lunch counter and being willing to face the consequences is very different from parking in the disabled s.p.a.ce and hoping you can get away with it. It also blurs our judgment of conduct. Whatever one thinks of them, The Legendary K.O. are doing something very different than a college student who just does not want to pay for music and downloads thousands of tracks for free from file sharing networks.

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The problem is not simply one of blurring. Technology-based "freedoms" are not reliable (though legal ones, too, may fail).

In a pinch, the technology may not save you, as thousands of those same downloaders have found out when sued by the RIAA and forced to pay thousands of dollars for an activity they thought to be private and anonymous. The Internet "solution" also leaves certain types of artistic creation dependent on the vagaries of the current technology, which may well change, eliminating some of the zone of freedom we currently rely on. But more worrisome is the fact that this "solution" actually confines certain types of art to the world of the Internet.

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The video of "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" could be seen by many, but only if they were wired to the right technological and social network. (After all, someone has to tell you to watch.) It was a searing intervention in the national debate on Katrina. But it appeared on no television station. Like most of the mashups created online, the fact that the rights could never be cleared keeps it off ma.s.s media.

Copyright acts as the barbed wire around ma.s.s media outlets.

That is a shame, I think. Not because that video is so good--you may love it or hate it. But because this kind of artwork has something important to contribute to our national culture.

Imagine a world in which Ray Charles could create "I Got a Woman," but could only circulate it to a narrow group of the file-trading digerati because of a flagrant violation of Clara Ward's copyright. Do we still get soul? The blues? Jazz? Or do we just get a precious and insular digital subculture, whose cultural experiments never reach the mainstream?

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Throughout his life, Charles described an intimate relations.h.i.+p with his audience, with the public. He described their tastes as a check, as a corrective; he thought they would actually be "ahead" of the artists. He wanted to make songs that would be listened to by tens of millions of people. And he wanted to make art and lots of money. I am all for the person who wants to create as an "amateur-professional" and distribute outside the chains of commerce. I have worked with organizations that make it easier to do this. But I also believe in the power and creativity of commercial culture and political speech carried on ma.s.s media. Ironically, our current copyright system serves it poorly.

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What is the solution to all of this? The music business runs on compulsory licenses, a legally granted ability to use music in certain ways without permission, though with a fee. The system seems to function pretty well. One solution is to extend that system to the world of mashups and derivative works. If you merely copy the whole of my work and circulate it on file sharing networks or on CDs, we apply the current rules and penalties. If, on the other hand, you make a "derivative" work, mixing your work with mine, then there are two alternatives. If you stay in the world of nonprofit exchange, you get a heightened presumption in favor of fair use (perhaps administered through a quicker and cheaper system of arbitration). If you move into the for-profit world, then you must pay a flat licensing fee or percentage of profits to the copyright holder.

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A second solution would be to curtail the hypertrophy of protectionism that made all this happen in the first place. The copyright term could be shortened or we could require renewal every twenty-eight years. (There are international treaties that currently forbid the latter alternative.) We could cut back on excesses like the Bridgeport decision, create incentives to make the music industry less legalistically insistent on policing the most atomic level of creation. We could exempt samples shorter than five seconds from copyright liability, clarify the boundaries of fair use, and extend it beyond parody to other genre-smas.h.i.+ng forms such as satire and collage.

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There are enormous obstacles to all these proposals. In particular, while artists fare very poorly under the current clearance culture--paying but not receiving the benefits of payments--the middlemen who profit from transaction costs are not keen on abolis.h.i.+ng them. Certainly if, as the Bridgeport court a.s.sumed, the recording industry is the party responsible for fine-tuning copyright law, we are hardly likely to see any reforms that threaten current modes of doing business. Yet there is a ray of hope. It is getting harder and harder to pretend that the rules ostensibly designed to encourage creativity are actually working. At the same time, more and more people are creating and distributing cultural objects--becoming "subjects"

of intellectual property law in the process, often to their dismay and irritation. It is in that conjunction--a far cry from the industry contract envisioned by the Bridgeport court--that hope for the future of copyright law's treatment of culture might lie.

Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies 1

Over the last forty years, much has changed in the way that scientific research and technological development are organized, funded, and inst.i.tutionally arranged. Much has also changed in the type of scientific and technical material that is covered by intellectual property rights, the ways that material is covered, the parties who hold the rights, and the state of research and development at which rights claims are made. Many academics who study both science's organizational structure and the intellectual property claims that surround it are concerned about the results. To say this is not to conjure up a tragically lost world of pure research science, untainted by property claims or profit motives. That world never existed and it is probably a good thing too. Intellectual property rights, and the profit motive more generally, have a vital and beneficial role in moving innovations from lab bench to bedside, from computer simulation to actual flight. The question is not whether intellectual property rights are useful as part of scientific and technological development. The question is what type of rights they should be, where in the research process those rights are best deployed, how they should coexist with state funded basic scientific and technological research, how broad they should be, how they should deal with new technologies, how long they should last, how they should treat follow-on innovations.

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I cannot hope here to answer all those questions, though some fascinating research has begun the process. Instead, as with the music chapter, I will offer a case study--actually two case studies--that try to illuminate the process I am describing, to ill.u.s.trate its pitfalls and its strange and unintended consequences.

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The two defining technologies of the last thirty years are biotechnology and the networked computer. Each is both product and platform. Innovations themselves, they are also const.i.tutive technologies that enable still more innovations. But at several historical moments in the development of each we came perilously close to breaking technology with law.1 Some would say that it was not just a close shave: we actually have hampered or limited the full potential of technology, slowing down its dynamism with a host of overbroad software patents, gene patents, and materials transfer agreements. Others are more optimistic. They think that a series of rapid improvisations by courts, scientists, programmers, and businesspeople has largely mitigated any problems caused by the process of legal expansion.2 But if mistakes were made, it is important to know what they were lest we continue or repeat them. If there were "fixes," it is important to know if they can be replicated.

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So were there mistakes? If so, have they been fixed, and how?

Drawing on an article I co-wrote with my brilliant colleague Arti Rai,3 this chapter suggests some answers to those questions by sketching out some details of the legal history of those technologies, concluding with a discussion of a single promising new technology that shares aspects of both--synthetic biology.

The answers are important. Behind the abstract words "innovation" or "technological development" there are lives saved or lost, communicative freedoms expanded or contracted, communities enabled or stunted, wealth generated or not. The subject would benefit from informed, sophisticated, democratic attention. It is not something you want to leave a host of lawyers and lobbyists to decide among themselves.

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A MACHINE THAT CONTAINS ALL OTHER MACHINES 6

Imagine a person staring at an infinite roll of paper tape. On the paper are symbols in some alphabet or number system. The reader carries out simple, operable instructions on the basis of that data. "Add together the next two digits you are presented with and write down the answer. If the answer is odd, go to step 2. If the answer is even, go to step 3." Now replace the person with a mechanical head that can "read" the instructions, carry out the desired operations, and write the answer down. The British mathematician Alan Turing imagined something like this--a little more complicated, perhaps, but fairly similar. What is it? We have the reading head, the set of instructions, the data on which the instructions are to be performed, the record of the result, and some kind of "state table" that tells the machine where it is in the process. These are the component parts of Turing machines--or as we know them better, computers. More accurately, Turing machines are a method of simulating the operation of computers, a metaphor that enables us to imitate their logical processes. In the words of Wikipedia, "despite their simplicity--[they] can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed." And to give lawyers fits. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

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In Greek mythology, Procrustes had a bed to which he fitted its prospective occupants, whether they liked it or not. The tall were trimmed down. The short stretched on the rack. Intellectual property lawyers have many similarities to Procrustes. The technologies that are brought before them are made to fit the conceptual boxes the law provides, boxes with names such as "copyright" and "patent." Occasionally, new conceptual boxes are made, but--for very good reasons--most of the time we stick with the boxes we have. As with Procrustes, things do not always fit and the process can be distressing for its subjects.

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It is important to realize that the process of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and stretching can be done well or badly. If it is done really badly, the technology is stunted, deformed, even destroyed. If it is done well, the law aids the development of the technology in exactly the happy way described in Chapter 1. What did our Procrustean legal system do with computers and computer science?

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I will focus on software--the set of instructions the machine is to perform. How should we think of it? Software is written down by programmers. It is recorded first in a form readable to humans, or at least geeks. Then, through a series of transformations, it is turned into the machine code, the ones and zeros that will operate the computer. But at its root it can be understood through the metaphor of the simple list of instructions to be carried out in order, just as with the Turing machine and its infinite tape.

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How should we fit software into the categories of intellectual property? We have "writing," fixation in some medium of symbols that can be read by others--both machine and human. Writing is normally the domain of copyright. Are computer programs copyrightable? All kinds of problems present themselves. At least in the United States, copyright covers expression. As I pointed out in a previous book, at its base is the conception of the romantic author impressing her uniqueness of spirit on the work at the moment of writing. It is that expressive choice, not the facts or ideas on which the work is based, that copyright covers. And it is only original expression that copyright covers. It does not cover purely functional objects, systems, processes, or methods of operation. One cannot copyright the coat hanger, the mousetrap, or long division. One cannot even copyright a "sculpture" if the main function of its design is to serve as a bicycle rack. Admittedly, one can copyright some expressive works that serve a practical purpose. A book about how to do double-entry bookkeeping is copyrightable. Yet copyright covers only the expressive choices used in selecting the words to explain the method, and the images to represent it, not the methods it describes or the facts or ideas it contains.

Can copyright cover computer programs? Should we see them as copyrightable how-to books or as uncopyrightable machines made of words?

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Machines and other functional innovations are normally the domain of patent rights. One can patent the mousetrap, and then one gets an exclusive right to the actual mechanically enabled method of catching mice, not just the artistic flourishes on the blueprint. Patents have more demanding criteria than copyrights.