The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible. To focus on copyright as the impediment is a false argument, and to imply that those who would uphold and strengthen it are opponents of universal and ready access is a false argument as well, as there is no inherent contradiction between the two. Like most, I am looking forward to the promised fluidity of information. I don’t know of anyone who opposes such a thing, useful and beguiling as it is.
Although at present its effect is chiefly a rise in economic productivity and a surge in frivolous entertainment, the phenomenon is in its infancy, and the synergy and ferment that can result from a new world of almost effortless appositions and cross-fertilizations may be of unchartable value. How could one fail to be enthusiastic about the transformation of every home, every seat on every commuter train, and every park bench, into a full-fledged branch of the greatest libraries in the world? Ignoring for a moment the coincident if not directly related decline in reading that is both obvious and documented, there are wonderful aspects to the transformation as well as drawbacks and dangers, and no reason that it cannot be implemented ethically and intelligently. Most certainly copyright does not stand in its way.
As we have seen, some are fervently convinced that it does, and their strong advocacy has moved public perception, pulling it in their direction partially because the opposition to their advocacy has been largely confined to immensely rich and impersonal corporate bodies with which it is nearly impossible to be sympathetic, and that are not agile enough to have created armies of blogging-ants steeped in self-righteous anger. These armies may be disreputable, but, like the graffiti that extend the limits of acceptability merely by their brazen appearance, they are influential.
Normally I don’t deal with foundations. My last grants, hangovers from the habits of the academy, arrived long ago. But in the months preceding the writing of this book, a foundation offered very generously and from the blue to underwrite the production of another book on an entirely different subject. I had to decline, but soon thereafter asked if they might underwrite this one. Their judgment was that they would not back such extreme and controversial positions as you have just read. This reaction, from a group of accomplished people whose resumes could choke a hippopotamus, made me doubt my sanity and discernment, until I reflected that the extreme position I advocate is a defense of the copyright system that has been with us, in one form or another, for three hundred years; an extreme position largely endorsed by the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the Founders, as well as the governments and peoples of most of the countries of the world. Although of course I do not think so, my stance may be not entirely correct, it may be the weaker of the two positions, it may even be wrong, but it cannot be extreme.
What magic has given the young coalition protesting this venerable system its sudden force? They have grounds only to be concerned with copyright’s efficiency relative to the processes and machines that have temporarily outrun it, something that can be easily corrected by the application of these very machines and processes to bring it up to their speed. You would think that this would obviate the necessity for their activism, let alone its groundswell. But it hasn’t.
I understood why, when I realized that when I think of them I cannot help but think of California. They are everywhere, from Boise to Trondheim, Barcelona, and back, but whenever they come up an image appears before me associatively of palm trees, strip malls, golden hills that reel under searingly blue skies, and surfboards strapped to purple Volkswagens driven by skinny boys with nineteenth-century French facial hair. I asked myself why I invariably associate the tormentors of copyright with these pictures. Is it because, when I lived in California in the late sixties it seemed so much like another planet, cut off from the history and culture of the East (not just the East Coast, but Europe and everything else all the way to China)? Is it because so many there have taken the opportunity to wipe civilization’s slate until it is squeaky clean, and that after they have done this there is in fact nothing on the slate? That in such a gorgeous place there is a contagious mental vacuum as deadly and dangerous as a black hole? That it is, as I used to call it, beauty and the abyss?
Actually not. It was much simpler than that, it was just the recurring image of the surfboards. A surfer is a skilled rider who achieves his transit and momentum through no force of his own—which in this case would be argument—but by opportunistically taking advantage of a wave. The wave here, like the tremendous waves that in some seasons strike the north coast of Oahu, is the technology that has washed almost without resistance over much of modern life.
The changes that have come in train make the destruction of the copyright system not only feasible but easy. The argument has not created the capability, the capability has created the argument. It was the same in Macaulay’s time, though on a lesser scale, when he protested, in his way, in reaction to the advent of mass printing techniques and an expansion in the reach and transmissibility of information analogous to that which we are now experiencing.
Flush with money and power, the keepers and users of the new machines and processes (whether giant corporations like Google portraying themselves as selflessly centralizing information within their control, or individuals high on their ability to summon information and images from
