Berkman Fellow (and MacArthur genius) Lewis Hyde is giving a Tuesday lunch talk on who owns creative content. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, typing quickly, getting things wrong, leaving things out.]

I.

He begins by quoting Goethe in the 1830s about his writings as “the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe” (quoting Goethe) vs. Emerson in “Self-Reliance” writing, “Insist on yourself; never imitate…” Lewis says our protocols around “intellectual property” side with Emerson. Defending “IP” against being enclosed can be seen, Lewis says, as defending a particular way of being human.

Science, he says, is collective. He cites Benjamin Franklin’s work on electrical theory. “None of what he did was the result of a solitary genius,” Lewis says. His equipment came from friends. He worked with three other folks in his lab. Franklin worked with Leyden jars (the first capacitors) which obviously were not invented by Franklin or they would have been called Franklin jars. Franklin also depended on Newton’s Optics, especially Query 21: “Aether (like our air) may contain particles which endeavor to recede from one another,” giving Franklin the idea that electricity was a fluid [Don’t trust my paraphrase here!]. Franklin also used Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood. “Finally, it was a culture that believed in open communication.” E.g., some German scientists published work on static electricity, which was published in France and translated into English. “This is how all scientists work: All collaborative and cumulative,” says Lewis.

Yet the image of Frankilin is that of a solitary genius with the mind of a “child of nature,” i.e., someone with an immediate relation to nature.

The 18th century idea of open communication arises from their view of the nature of truth. Franklin wrote to friends that his ideas are “crude and hasty,” but (Franklin wrote) communicating scientific ideas often improves them. “Collective inquiry is less prone to error than individual inquiry,” said Franklin. “The breeding ground of the truth lies in the breeding ground of conversation.” Franklin did not defend his ideas about electricity on the ground that “If they are right. Truth and Experience will support them. If worng they ought to be refuted and rejected,” he wrote. “Disputes are apt to sour one’s Temper.” The truth arises in conversation, not in solitude, reports Lewis.

This affected Franklin’s view of the ownership of ideas. He declined a patent on the wood stove (which is not known, one might add, as the Leydon stove) because inventions come out of a community. Private interests may prompt a person to defend his ideas whether right or wrong, Franklin thought, says Lewis.

Salston in The Common Thread about the Human Genome Project says that you have to have protocols of non-ownership if you want to do science. In this he is like Franklin.

Franklin’s work was the result of a collective being that bears the name Franklin, Lewis concludes.

II.

Franklin often published anonymously, which was a gesture to indicate that the author intended to write impartially, Lewis says, speaking for the public good, not private ends. Thomas Paine explained the anonymity of Common Sense:e “Who the author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as the object for attention is the doctrine itself, not the man.”

It was believed that each individual has only a partial view: a part of the truth, and partial to one one’s own interests. Opinion (which we would call “belief” these days, says Lewis) existed between truth and falsity. It was assumed to belong to individuals. It wasn’t as certain as truth, of course. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin gave a speech saying that he had doubts about the Constitution, but he had doubts about his doubts. “I consent…to this Constitution … The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good,” Franklin said. Each must doubt his own doubt for the sake of the public good. “He asks them to give up their partial views,” Lewis says. His speech itself modeled that.

“For the 18th C., self-sacrifice is constitutive of citizenship in the public sphere. The citizen cannot own his or her ideas.” Where writers claim their writing in their own distinctive voice, it will be harder to create a lively public sphere, Lewis says. [Or the character of that public sphere changes, and certainly how it supports truth. The Internet is a lively public sphere, but it is not a selfless distilling of truth. Truth is something else on the Net.]

“Can you come up with a case in which self-erasure in public utterance enables a valued way of being?” Lewis asks himself. He answers that when judges issue opinions, they frequently plagiarize the briefs from the attorneys. But, says Lewis, plagiarism is the wrong term. Legal writing tends to be written by communities, and you can’t claim it by copyright. Having your work cut and pasted without attribution into an opinion is a sign of success and honor.

A second example. The MLK “I have a Dream” speech copyright is owned by his estate and it charges for its use. Our practices around public discourse constitute who we are, says Lewis. The King estate has moved MLK from one category to another. “It is a type of patricide,” concludes Lewis.

Overall point: The choices we make about the commons is a choice about what type of being we are. Hollywood has one view. Franklin had another.

Q: (me) That was amazing. Just to pick up one point, the 18th C view of anonymity is so different from ours, from what you say. They were anonymous in order to present a non-partial, non-individual belief whereas we tend to use anonymity to enable us to be so partial and individual that we dare not sign our names. What does that tell us about who we are and our relation to truth?
A: I’ve hidden some trap doors in this talk. E.g., you had to be somebody before you could become the nobody of anonymity. Women and slaves didn’t have enough standing to be able to erase themselves through anonymous works. So, my response to your question is to complicate the 18th C view of anonymity.

[I missed the next question, but here’s Lewis’ answer.] A lot of this goes back to the myths of how authors make a living. The myth is that you make your living out of copyrights, which is true for only a tiny handful of writers.

The Spectator was in fact a persona, says Lewis. The Spectator was everywhere observing. This is like print itself, says Lewis. Franklin began his career by ripping off The Spectator. His brother was the first to publish a newspaper “without authority.” The self was shaped by the development of a free press.

Q: You over-emphasize the social side of self.
A: Because individualism is not in danger. I think Franklin’s solution to the circle of self and group was humor. “If I had become humble, I would have been proud of my humility,” Franklin said. He was incredibly vain and a dedicated humble servant, and he managed the interface with humor.

Q: (JP ) (i) When Franklin gave up patents, he was wealthy. (ii) Do you have a normative view about mashups?
A: (i) His wealth was another trapdoor I tried to hide. His wealth repositions his argument. I’ve searched his works for every remark on patent, and I’ve found one case where he argued for granting a patent to people who wanted to immigrate from the UK with a patent for a technique used in the UK…He was simultaneously for patent and for piracy of a British patent. (ii) We’re in transition. We need to preserve a balance. I do believe in one of the original arguments for patent: To establish people apart from patronage.

Q: (me) Are you saying we should go back to the 18th C sense of self? You seem to like it. [Hmm. It sounds hostile in print. It wasn’t in person. Not at all.]
A: I’m using history as a way of exploring the self. We can’t go back to the 18th C, but it provides one way of opening up the question. It’s not 18th C to say we’re collective beings, not just private individuals.

Q: (me) But at the next level of detail of how we’re social and private and our relation to truth, are we now different?
A: It’s going to be different because it’s not a print culture any more. It will have different self formations.

Q: (doc) Has the modern corporation affected the self?
A: Michael Sandel’s Democracy and Its Discontents. [Tags: lewis_hyde commons patents benjamin_franklin copyright copyleft anonymity ]

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