"Don't fret," she said. "These villages have an entirely different concept of property. There can't be theft when there isn't private property, and the kids know you'll want all of your stuff before we leave."
Here in the 21st Century Euro-west, we use the possessive pronoun freely: my house, my writing, my kids, my ideas. A lot of important customs and laws are devoted to protection of property, rights are assigned, and mechanisms for property dispute resolution are a veritable industry. Furthermore, our ideas of ownership are woven into our money system. I'm paid royalties (however pathetically modest) for my books, and I can be sued for real sums of money if I appropriate what is considered to be property I don't own.
This idea of property and money are so fundamental to the USA that the patent system is located in Article I of our Constitution. Section 8 reads in part:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Our Founding Persons probably didn't anticipate genetic engineering, blockbuster drugs, the Internet and other sources of ownership puzzles in modern times. About 20 years ago I co-authored a little book with Hope Shand (Foreword by Bill McKibbon) called, The Ownership of Life: When Patents and Values Clash. The book examined claims by the genetic engineering industry that it could violate our patent system prohibition on owning the natural world (eg., patenting genes and cells) to recoup their investments. I also participated in some intense negotiations in Europe between health advocates for southern countries and big pharma companies, to establish lower prices for key medications needed by poor people.
Ownership of the living world has mostly tilted in favor of the genetic engineering corporations. Major portions of humanity's food supply, thousands of sites in your brain, and the blood of certain indigenous tribes are examples of wholly owned property of transnational corporations. I'm on the board of a group that works to protect native peoples around the world from having their most intimate selves involuntarily appropriated. You can learn more about the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism at www.ipcb.org .
The drug situation is much better. Although there is much more work to be done, millions of poor people now have access to life saving medicines.
What I want to focus on today is the third leg of the ownership revolution triad, the Internet. The "digital revolution" of the past 30 years brings great challenges to our concepts of ownership and compensation for work performed. If I wrote a song in 1975, it was pressed into a vinyl record and you could buy it in a store. Eventually a few cents would find its way to me, the creator of that work. The same with printed books - even today.
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| The Salt Marsh Content Creation Committee |
Two things are different now. For one thing, distribution of electronic media is almost universal, immediate, and possible without much mediation by distributors - Amazon notwithstanding. I can write a blog, post it on the Internet and it is immediately available to anyone in Maine or southeastern Nigeria to read, change, republish, or claim as her own.
Second, the Internet is 100% digital, the famous 1's and 0's. Aside from making global distribution possible, the digital nature of content is also totally fungible - it can be transformed into anything else on the internet. My song pressed into a plastic record could be resold, but only exactly in the form in which I created it. In the digital world, you can rearrange or change my content; there are even programs that make paintings out of songs and songs out of paintings. In a sense, the Internet blurs the lines that separate "things."
Most important, ideas of compensation are being challenged as individuals struggle with how the creators of content can earn a living, and indeed who creators really are.
Here's my question for you today: how can we reconcile the need for ideas and works of creative inspiration to flow freely to audiences, while still compensating artists, composers, writers and others who share on the Internet?
How we deal with these thorny issues is still evolving and will for some time. But I think some patterns are beginning to emerge:
1. Our Article I Section 8 - based system of patents and ownership is dying. It was based not on a universal truth from God, but on the English enclosure movement of the 16th Century that was handmaiden to modern agriculture and the industrial revolution. Our ideas of personal and group ownership are so ingrained, we forget they are relatively recent and fairly local phenomena.
2. A subset of the patent system - copyright - is also undergoing re-thinking. Nowadays one merely needs to publish a work and state that it's copyright - and it is, with the full force of law. On the Internet, people are working out new relationships of creator to content. The system I use is not US Copyright Law, but the Creative Commons license you can see at the very bottom of this blog. It's an effort to protect content, while separating mechanisms for compensation of authors from the publication of their work.
3. Huge industries grew up to profit from the old system, interposing themselves between creators and consumers - companies like BMI and Disney and Time Warner and Barnes and Noble. Some of the biggest and most powerful of those companies are now in an epic war over an old-style ownership bill, called SOPA in the House of Representatives and PIP in the US Senate. Their opponents are a coalition of newer companies that have grown up to profit from the Internet, with names like Amazon, Apple, and Google. They are joined by legions of enthusiastic Internet content makers and consumers. How this plays out in the short run remains to be seen, but I believe that over the longer term, the safe bet is with newer regimes to manage fungible digital content worldwide.
4. Few people earn a decent living writing books or music or essays unless they're Stephen King or Pearl Jam or Paul Krugman. Talk about the 1% versus 99%! The vast majority of people who make and share art and ideas sustain themselves in other ways.
I think that we may be at the first of a number of forks in the road as our concepts of ownerships undergo a revolution. This is a fork that provide a big boost to the tiniest fish in the creative sea. On one road leading from the fork is an effort to control the content itself. The Creative Commons license is a first step to intervene: it address what to do if you take what I've written, monkey around with it and attribute that altered version to me.
The other fork breaks the distribution of the work from payment to the author. I choose not to "monetize" this blog. But if I did, I'd permit the mammoth corporation that owns the blogging service (which is free to me) to post ads on this site. I'd be be giving you my deathless prose in exchange for permitting Google's access to your eyeballs, and Google would use its secret formulas (protected by Article I Sec 8) to set a monetary value for your attention - for sale to the highest bidder.
I might well be proved wrong, but I have a feeling that this fork is going to work better for the little guy, at least better than the old system. It changes (but doesn't eliminate) the powerful mediating companies. It weakens the monopolistic tendencies of content distribution. It may result in improved linkages between what is created and how people who make things earn money.
And most important of all, as far as I'm convened, the new age of ownership vastly increases our access to each other. Finding a book publisher is a horrendous process that eliminates the overwhelming majority of authors from the public marketplace. Nowadays it's incredibly cheap and easy to write a book or a poem or a mathematical formula and make it available to much of the rest of our species. The sharing of human lives is simply exploding.
I'm no worshipper of computers or the Internet. But I see before us a set of tools for an entirely unprecedented mushrooming of creativity and collaboration. Even now, we're living in a time when people in Nigeria and Maine can put their heads together, or see each other's poetry and photos. I believe we're standing at the crest of a hill, and while the new territory before us is no promised land, it may prove to be fertile and enriching. A few decades from now, people may be looking at our time as the dawn of an era of comity and innovation like nothing else in human history. Stay tuned.