How can we use the things we share in common to address some of the most challenging problems facing the world? This course examines issues concerning poverty, the environment, technology, health care, gender, education and activism to help us understand better how to initiate positive change.
From Copyright to Communities of Cooperative Practice
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How to Change the World
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What are Social Goods? From the Commons to Moral Revolutions
Discussion about what our social good is, how we define it and how it can be sustainably used.
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Michael S. Roth
[MUSIC]
>> So to say this in terms of the copyright realm, a copyright,
originally, in the 18th century, was a 14-year grant.
If you still were alive, you could get 28 years.
It was limited in time. It was limited in scope, too.
It was just printed material where you could make a real copy.
Fast-forward to the present.
The term of copyright for an individual such as myself
is my life plus 70 years. So plausibly it's well over a century.
For a corporation it's 95 years. And these are very long terms.
They are statistically indistinguishable from a perpetual term.
>> Right.
>> So whereas in the early days copyright was a clearly limited
grant, a monopoly grant now it is a fairly unlimited monopoly grant.
And also it covers a range of things that were never covered before.
The simple example is it used to be the case that you had to ask for
a copyright, register with a copyright office, put
a mark on your book, and so forth.
That's all been done away with.
What are called formalities have disappeared.
And now everything you make in tangible form automatically
is yours to own should you care to do it.
So if you take notes
in a class, they are yours, and copyrighted, technically.
So, it's a, it's expanded in terms of its length.
And it's expanded in terms of what it covers.
And this is plausibly a taking from the commons.
That is to say, if copyright lasted, let's say 50 years, after
50 years everything falls into the public domain, which is a cultural commons.
If you extend
it another 20 years, you're taking things out of the,
>> Right.
>> cultural commons and giving them to private owners.
Now, there's arguments on both sides of this, but but it's,
it's been a real tipping point in the last few decades.
A second example would be the way that the patent rights have been expanded.
It always used to be the case that you
could not patent something that you found in nature.
>> Right. >> If you figured
out, you know, what temperature water boils
at, that was not something you could own.
In recent years, we've allowed people to patent
or, organisms that they find in hot springs.
Until there was a recent Supreme Court decision,
you could patent part of the human DNA information.
And this is a change.
That is to say before about 1950 you couldn't, and now you can.
And with the DNA business, this went to the Supreme Court.
And to explain what was at stake one company, named Myriad,
owned the right to a piece of the human DNA associated
with breast cancer, and therefore they were able to charge higher
prices for their tests and limit other people making experiments around this.
This is not in the public good.
It, it's good if you're a stockholder of Myriad Corporation.
>> Right.
>> But it's not it's not in the commons, which is where it should be.
So, and maybe the last thing to say about the expansion of of
the market into places where it hadn't thought it might go before, is
that I feel there's a kind of new colonialism in which the United States is
and the other sort of high tech countries, are interested in making
their rules of the road around the ownership of
art and ideas into the international rules of the road.
So one interesting thing is the United States used to be a pirate nation.
>> Yeah.
>> For the first 100 years of our existence,
we happily took all the books printed in Europe,
and gave them to American printers, and let them
print them without any permission asked or fees given
back to European authors.
And this is the case in general with intellectual property-importing nations.
They're happy to import, >> Yeah.
>> and not pay fees.
And we, we were happy to do so for 100 years.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and we would
like to export our rules of the road to other countries.
A similar example of a place we did that:
after the invasion of Iraq, there was an interim authority
that the United States set up.
And before they left, they left changes in the Iraqi intellectual property laws
that they would like to see enact,
including copyrighting public performances of the Quran.
[LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> This, this is a bizarre change in the in the cultural commons of an Islamic
nation and would be representative of a kind of neocolonial
exporting of the property rules of one nation into the
rest of the world. >> And, and I, I think what you've
argued in Common as Air is that, is that these efforts to
convert the commons into private property that can be marketed and,
or sold in different ways depletes the reservoir from which we all draw
for cultural production, for cultural sustenance.
That in fact sometimes under the rubric of
protecting the author or the creator what we'd
have is an impoverishment of the reservoir from
which we create new literature, new music, new practices.
>> Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, part of the assumption here is that to be a lively creative
person, it helps to have a lively creative commons,
>> Yes.
>> around you. >> Yeah.
>> And again, I should say briefly that I'm
not opposed to a short-term copyright or a short-term patent.
I think these are very useful tools of public policy.
But the but the balance has been lost. And there are many situations in which
the monopoly power that we give to the owners of cultural property
has inhibited fur, further work.
A simple example would be the estate of James Joyce.
For some reason, James Joyce's grandfather has, I mean, grandson,
has a grudge against people who work on James Joyce.
So he, he, for years, just forbade people to use the work
and reprint it, and essentially squashed a whole series of of works.
And there
are lots of cases like this, a kind of cultural
aphasia, in which if you get the right lawyer and
are willing to spend the money and time, you can
usually figure out how to say the thing you want to say.
But in fact, between you and that stands
a kind of permissions culture, in which money
and people incentivized to be your enemies [LAUGH]
may prevent you from saying what you want to say.
>> Yes.
>> Yeah. >> Well I saw this
when I created this exhibition on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis years ago.
We worked with the Freud estate and with the
Freud Museum, but just as you described, this permissions
culture really limited our ability to use certain things
that I would have imagined in the public domain.
Even small clips of things that were very well known
to, you know museum goers all over the world suddenly
somebody arrived with a piece of paper saying no, no, no, you can't show 30
seconds of this movie or quote this song because it is not in the commons.
It is ours.
And
>> Yeah.
>> and that, it was a, it was
a sobering experience, again, limiting our ability to
to say something we wanted to say about
the cultural importance, in this case of psychoanalysis.
What do you think people can
do eh, to contribute to the reenerget, get, energizing,
or of the commons, or what can people do to
contribute to the commons now, in this, in this new regime?
>> Well, I mean, I would say the first thing to do is to, to educate yourselves.
I think it's a duty of current cultural citizenship,
>> Yes. >> to know
how this system works, and what its problems are, and so forth.
So awareness is the first step.
Then maybe two categories of pushback. One would be trying to work with the law.
And the other would be trying to work with
norms, or customs, or, or principles of best practices.
To give the law thing, very quickly.
You know,
in the US Constitution, it says that the copyright and patent terms sh,
should be limited. So that's a legal expression of the fact
that an unlimited copyright monopoly is not a good thing.
And so we can get things written into law and have tried to
do so. There would be useful stinting
of the commons. >> Yes.
>> But another way to do it is, is to simply find practice
communities, and have them think about, how does this work best for us?
Example would be, the people who work on
the Human Genome, and other genome projects got together
once in Bermuda and came up with a set
of ground rules for themselves called the Bermuda Principles.
>> Right.
>> And
one piece of it, for example, is
they agreed that at any research center any place
in the world got to a certain level of description
of a new piece of genetic information, they would
post it on the World Wide Web within 24 hours.
And there are computers internationally which consolidate all this data.
So every morning, all over the world, all these
scientists are working from the same set of information.
And this is not about the law at all.
It's just about people saying, look, this is, we need a commons of
our ideas if we're going to proceed with this kind of complicated research.
So thinking about norms and thinking about the law, the
final thing I would say is that one thing about the
traditional embodied commons of Europe, such as woods, and fields,
and streams, and so forth, was that there was a custom
called beating the bounds.
And this meant that every year in
your village, people would get together in springtime,
and they would have cakes and beer and the, you know, party favors and stuff.
>> Yeah.
>> And, and they would walk around the village with axes and mattocks and stuff.
And if they found any place where people
had encroached upon the commons, they'd tear it down.
They would beat the bounds to make sure the commons was maintained.
>> Yes.
>> So I would, I think we should think about
also beating the bounds.
I mean, to give a modern example of this it is the case that the
entertainment industry, which has its own sense of
how it should operate and make money and
so forth often comes to colleges and
universities and says, we'd like you to police
your students and have them behave so that they conform to our model of the world.
And colleges and universities should
resist this, because in fact the college
and university sense of how knowledge circulates and
what its purpose is, is different from the the sense that they have in Hollywood.
It's not that one is right and one is wrong; they are really just distinct.
And so if the Hollywood people come and say, we'd
like to put a lot of software on your computer systems
so that we're monitoring your kids at all times, the college
should say, no, we have an edge between us and you,
and it's important to maintain that edge. So to save the commons,
there's law, there's customs and norms, but also, we should beat the bounds.
We should keep the edge.
>> Yeah.
Keep the edge, it's a great, it's a way, it's
a great way of, of bringing this conversation to a close.
I, I know here at Wesleyan I have a colleague in,
in astronomy who they too have this commons of, of data,
every morning, J, from JPL, or their other sources.
They get data from the Moon, the Mars rover, and other sp, space probes.
And all, everyone can work on this latest data.
And, of course, in the arts people want to be able to draw from a a, a,
common set of cultural reference points cultural
production and and practices.
And I, I think th, a class like the one we're preparing now is it's aimed as
an experiment to see what happens when we share
things we know, as widely as possible, for free.
You know, I have colleagues university presidents, who
say to me, Michael, you're going to, you're killing the
university, because, you know, it's not free at the
university, and we need to pay our professors, and
we need to have property. And we do.
But I have found in this experiment, sharing what, what we
know with as many people as possible actually doesn't take away
from our ability to make things on campus, or to, to
write books and sell them, or to make recordings and sell them.
It actually increases our ability to share ideas, and participate in a culture.
And keeping
the edge beating the bounds, is something
we're, we're certainly going to continue to do.
Thank you so much for joining us in this conversation, Lewis.
It's been a pleasure to talk with you.
>> Thank you. It's been fun to share all this.
>> Thanks very much. Bye-bye.
>> You too.
Bye-bye. >> There
are cultural goods, there are social goods that the more, the more we share
doesn't mean the less anybody will have.
We want to be in situations where we
can share in things without dimis, diminishing the quality
of our individual experience, or the quality of our
collective experience, and without diminishing the resource itself, right?
So when I listen to music and enjoy it, it doesn't
mean there's less music to go around.
If I bring too many cows to the pasture, there's less pasture to go around.
How can we, can make the pasture more like the music?
How can we make our private enjoyments more social in our
responsibility, in our pleasure, and in our thinking about their futures.
That, that's one of the themes of this course.
Now, in this
course, we're not going to spend a lot of time philosophically musing
about oh, how to turn a private enjoyment into a public good.
That, that's, that's another kind of class.
That's a, a class in political philosophy, or a class in in, in ethics.
In our class, we're going to actually turn to some really seemingly intractable
problems, and try to understand how by thinking of them in social terms, thinking
of them in cooperative terms, we might be able to deal with them more effectively.
We start off with poverty, especially in light of aid and philanthropy.
Extreme poverty is one of the great plagues on our planet.
And many people think we have made great strides,
in, in in dealing with it over the last decades.
And we have set goals for the next few decades.
What are the techniques we use to
deal with extreme poverty that are most effective?
How can we, by understanding those techniques
more fully, support those kinds of organizations
that are best able to eradicate, or
at least reduce, the levels of extreme poverty?
That's going
to be the, the subject for next week and I'm very much looking
forward to working cooperatively [LAUGH] with you as we think about
these major global challenges, and then figure out a few things we
can do to address them and make a positive difference.
See you
next
time.
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