On “socialism”: round II

May 31, 2009  ·  Lessig

There’s an interesting resistance (see the comments) to my resistance to Kevin Kelly’s description of (what others call) Web 2.0 as “socialism.” That resistance (to my resistance) convinces me my point hasn’t been made.

Confidence about my “ignorance” about political philosophy notwithstanding (and don’t tell my political philosophy tutor from Cambridge where I spent three years studying the stuff), my point is not that it is impossible to understand “socialism” as Kelly describes it. (Obviously, if a missile can be a “peacekeeper,” anything can be anything). It is not even that never in the history of “socialism” have people so understood it (there have of course been plenty of voluntary communities that have called themselves “socialist”). Instead, my argument against Kelly was about responsibility in language: How would the words, or label, he used be understood. Not after, as I said, reading “a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term.” Rather, how would it be understood by a culture that increasingly has the attention span of 140 characters?

In my view, the answer to that question is absolutely clear: “Socialist” would be associated with the dominant, modern vision of “socialism” which has, at its core, coercion. And as the Internet that Kelly and I celebrate doesn’t have “coercion” at its core, I maintain, it is not “socialist.”

In reading the reactions to my argument, however, I realize that in using the term “coercion” I was committing the same error that I was accusing Kelly of making. People associate the word “coercion” with Abu Ghraib or Stalin. And certainly, the “coercion” of socialism isn’t necessarily (or even often) that.

That’s fair. By “coercion” I meant simply law — that “socialism” is a system enforced by law, and enforced contrary to the way individuals would freely choose autonomously to associate. Again, I’m for that kind of coercion in lots of contexts. I’m for income redistribution (to some degree); I want better public schools, I want to force you to vaccinate your childeren, etc. So I didn’t mean anything necessarily negative by the term “coercion.” I meant something analytical: That Wikipedia, if it coerces, coerces differently from how 95% (of Americans) at least understand the term “socialism.”

Again, if you doubt that, think about American critics of “socialism”: None of them are complaining about people voluntarily choosing to associate however they choose to associate (except of course if they are gay). They are complaining about people being forced to associate in ways they don’t choose to associate. There’s nothing inconsistent with someone being a Right Wing (and anti-socialist) Republican yet working at a church soup kitchen every other Saturday. Those spheres are separate in the American mind. Because they are separate, one can choose to be a Wikipedian and see no inconsistency in voting for Ronald Reagan.

(But aren’t the “freely chosen obligations” often enforced (i.e., in my terms, “coerced”) by the state? Of course they are — as the Legal Realists and most recently Critical Legal Studies Movement worked very hard to remind us. But they had to work so hard because they were working against a very solid assumption about the sense of the term “coercion.” They wanted to change it. But they at least acknowledged there was something there to change.)

So my argument against Kelly is that it is wrong to use a term (in the context of a Wired essay at least; a philosophy seminar would invoke a completely different set of ethics) that would be so completely misunderstood. We choose our words. We don’t choose our meaning.

But if you’re still not convinced, then here’s a hypothetical that makes the same point. (And note, I’m being REALLY careful here — this is ONLY a hypothetical):

Imagine someone said Barack Obama’s economic policies were “fascist.” But by that the person didn’t mean the Fascism of the later German Nazi Party. He didn’t mean, that is, the racism that came to define the term. Instead, he meant the Fascism of the early National Socialist Party, or of their equivalent in Italy, or England, or the earliest of FDR’s administration.

My point is that however accurate it would be to describe the current “Czar” filled administrations with the centralizing and corporatist politics of the early 1930s, it would be unethical to call it “fascist.” The term has been marked, just as the name “Adolf” has been marked, and in mixed, attention deprived contexts, it is wrong to ignore that marking.

Secondly, and finally: Even if it weren’t, Kelly’s description would be wrong. Even if there were a useable concept (as opposed to a possible concept) of “voluntary socialism,” it would be wrong to describe what most think of as Web 2.0 as “socialist.” That again because of the part Kelly ignores. Sure, there’s a “sharing economy” as I describe in REMIX. That economy fits well with the Kibbutz or Wikipedia. And if you want to call that “socialist,” fine. But the “hybrid” economy is not that economy. The Facebooks and Twitters and Flickrs and Yelps! are not entities engaged in a global urge to hug. They are companies that promise investors a huge return from their very risky investment. To do that, of course, they need to behave differently from the dominant mode of, say, Hollywood lawyers. But if they behave like Gandhi, they’re not going to succeed at their mission — which is (however much “change the world” or “don’t be evil” is in the plan) to make money. Those people are not “socialists” (except in the corrupted sense that defines the term in many places today). Those people are members of a hybrid economy. What Tim calls “Web 2.0.” And while I can well understand that someone would feel “torture,” as Kelly puts it, using that term (I don’t feel it, but who am I dictate to Kelly), the fear of that torture doesn’t justify this violation of the ethics of language. The freedom of Wikipedia et al., is threatened enough. We don’t need to throw the baggage of “socialism” into the bargain.

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Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not “socialism”)

May 28, 2009  ·  Lessig

As I wrote last week, I threw away a week I didn’t have penning an “insanely long” review (as I described it), of Mark Helprin’s insanely sloppy “Digital Barbarism.”

The part of that book that really got me going was the incessant Red-baiting — the suggestion that the movement of which I am a part is a kind of warmed over Marxism from the 1960s.

That part always gets me going because it betrays a kind of mushiness in thinking that I should have thought a decade of writing by scores of advocates would have driven away. As I wrote about Helprin:

It is in this extreme of Red-baiting that one can see the mushiness of Helprin’s brain: Let’s say he were attacking a bunch of scholars who believed copyright should be as robust as the Framers of our Constitution had it. That was a regime that secured copyrights only to those who registered their work. And not just any work, but only “maps, charts, book or books” (music, for example, was excluded). Imagine the term of the protection was again just as the Framers made it — 14 years, renewable by the author, if living, for another 14 years (but again, only if he registered the renewal). And imagine finally that the rights granted were forfeit if the author failed to deposit the copyrighted work with the government, or if he failed to mark the work with the appropriate sign. Such a reform would certainly be radical. It is wildly more radical than anything any of the scholars Helprin attacks would recommend.

But here’s the question: would one who so recommended be a “collectivist”? Were our Framers “collectivists”? Obviously not. Because the consequence of a limited copyright is not that the collective gets to control who does what. The consequence of a limited copyright is that the work is in the public domain, and anyone has the liberty to do anything he or she wants with the work. The state or the “collective” is not privileged over the individual. The individual is privileged over the state or “collective.” And so strong is that privilege in America that a Court of Appeals in Colorado recently held that the government can’t remove work from the public domain unless it satisfies a strict First Amendment test first.

The kind words of some in response to the review made me think perhaps the week wasn’t completely wasted. But then as I got settled into a 13 hour flight to Australia, I read this piece by Kevin Kelly, “The New Socialism.”

Words have meaning. We don’t get to choose their meaning. If you call something “X” people will hear the equation. They won’t read the fine-print which says (“By X, I mean really not-X).

Kelly says:

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.

That statement is flatly wrong. It is completely unreasonable to call that “socialism” — at least when the behavior described is purely voluntary. It’s like saying “Because Stalin set up a competition between different collective farms, it’s not unreasonable to call that free market capitalism.” Both statements are wrong because they point to a feature that is common, and ignore the feature that is distinctive. At the core of socialism is coercion (justified or not is a separate question). At the core of the behavior Kelly celebrates is freedom.

Kelly’s argument is like so many today that has implicitly embraced the view that free market, libertarian sorts believe that the only thing in the world is competition, or people working to non-common goals. It is the idea that we are free only if we are antagonistic, and that free market theorists have been working to create a world where individuals struggle against, not with. A world that aspires to dog-eat-dog as its central value.

But that conception of capitalism/free-market/libertarianism has no basis in fact. And so as I ranted in my head about Kelly’s confusion, I was enormously happy to have the chance to hear an economist at the conference I was attending at Canberra present a paper that (unintentionally) completely destroys Kelly’s thesis.

Nicholas Gruen is an economist with the consulting group, Lateral Economics. His paper (PDF) (blog entry) was titled “Adam Smith 2.0: Emergent Public Goods, Intellectual Property and the Rhetoric of Remix.” And he introduced the paper by remarking a fact that I had missed — this year is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s first (and last) published book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (alas, the second edition). (Last because he finished his 6th edition of the book responding to the terrors of the French revolution just before he died in 1790).

What the modern misunderstanding of markets forgets about Smith is that his aim was as much to understand the provision of public goods as it was to understand the role of the market. Indeed, you could only understand the role of the market against a background of public goods (including civil society), and one critically important question is how a society produces those public goods.

Unlike statists of later years, Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods — goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example — language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. But Smith was eager to describe a wide range of emergent public goods that set the preconditions to a well functioning market.

Obviously, in this focus on civil society, Smith is not alone — even among the heros to libertarian/capitalist/free marketeers. In this respect, Hayek continues the tradition Smith began. He too was deeply sensitive to the health of civil society, and recognized how civil society was produced by “masses of people who own the means of production [and] work toward a common goal and share their products in common, [people who] contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge.” But Hayek too was not “socialist.”

The thing that Smith was pointing to (and Hayek too), is not “socialism.” It is not reasonably called socialism. Because “socialism” is the thing Smith was attacking in the 6th edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Socialism is using the power of the state to force a result that otherwise would not have been chosen voluntarily by the people. As Gruen quotes Smith:

The man of system. . . is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Coercive government action is — IMHO — a necessary condition of something being “socialism.” It isn’t sufficient — there is plenty of coercive governmental action that doesn’t qualify as socialism, like raising taxes to fund national defense, or to pay the police. But if you’re calling something “socialist,” then a requirement for using that term correctly — meaning in the way it is understood at least by people who don’t take the time to read a 3,500 word essay that redefines the term — is to be able to point to the coercive state action that produces the thing you’re talking about.

I’m not an opponent to all things plausibly called “socialist” (though as I’ll argue in a moment, our political culture could do well to avoid the most prominent examples of socialism that Washington has produced over the past 8 years). A graduated income tax could properly be called “socialist,” because it is coerced, though I’m in favor of it. Forcing polluters to internalize the cost of their pollution (carbon as well as others) is not, in my view, properly called “socialist,” even though it is the product of coercive state action. There are many examples in the middle of course — schools, parks, public highways. But all of the examples of proper “socialism” begin with pointing to coercion by the state. A conservative Baptist church is not “socialist” when it voluntarily collects money to give to the poor, even though the result is similar to the result of a “socialist” plan to redistribute money from the rich to the poor.

On this account, none of the things that Kelly (and I) celebrate about the Internet are “socialist.” No one forces Wikipedia editors to build a free encyclopedia. No one sends to the Gulag (Helprin’s book notwithstanding) photographers who don’t use CC licenses to share their photographs in Flickr. Scientists who share their research freely within the Public Library of Science are not necessarily friends of Che. They may be. But their freely sharing their knowledge is not a certain signal of leftist leanings.

All this would have been obvious to Kelly if he had included in his list of purportedly “socialist” organizations the Christian Right. Say what you want about the politics of the Christian Right (and don’t get me started), one can’t say they are “socialists.” But likewise, whatever you think about organized religion (and again, don’t get me started), one can’t deny that it represents “masses of people who own the means of production work[ing] toward a common goal and share[ing] their products in common, [] contribut[ing] labor without wages and enjoy[ing] the fruits free of charge.” Yet it would be patently “unreasonable” to call the Baptist Church “socialism.”

Likewise might this have been obvious if Kelly had focused on other writing about the stuff he and I celebrates, that emphasizes more than Benkler, for example, the commercial or business dimension to this phenomenon. Half of REMIX is about what Kelly calls the “hybrid,” but my point is about the hybrid as a business strategy. So too with the fantastic book, Wikinomics. Again, the focus of that book is on how a sharing economy gets leveraged by a commercial economy to benefit both. In no instance is that leveraging coercion. In no way, therefore, is it “socialism.”

Now of course Kelly works hard in his essay to disassociate the term “socialism” from lots of “cultural baggage” (as he puts it; victims of the Gulag may have a different way of describing that): As he writes:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

And of course, these distinctions are right and true. But what is not true is that something is “socialism” because “technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions.” Tim O’Reilly gave us a good enough word for such technologies — Web 2.0. And if that term is too geeky, then how about “civil society”? Or the extraordinary words of Smith from 250 years ago.

I launch this rant against a friend not to betray a Stallman-like-tic. I think think some fuzzy language is productive. I don’t insist on precision at every linguistic turn.

But sloppiness here has serious political consequences. When a founder of the movement which we all now celebrate calls this movement “socialist,” that plays right in the hand of those would attack everything this movement has built. Again, see Helprin. Or Andrew Keen.

It is a fact that in America the term “socialism” is a smear. I’m not defending that fact. I wouldn’t give up defending programs merely because they could be so smeared.

But I do think that now is not the time to engage in a playful redefinition of a term that has such a distinctive and clear sense. Whatever “socialism” could have become, had it not been hijacked by revolutions in the east, what it is in the minds of 95% of America is not what Wikipedia is.

And indeed, when I look around at the real socialism of the past decade, I am almost Declan-esque in my revulsion towards it: America has plenty of “socialism.” The most recent versions we should all be very skeptical of. This is the general practice of socializing risk, and privatizing benefits. I’d be happy to join the “anti-socialist” movement if we could agree to end that perversion first.

But that deal notwithstanding, I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on the Net “socialism.” That term insults the creators, and confuses the rest.

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Digital Barbarism)" rel="bookmark">The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin’s Digital Barbarism)

May 20, 2009  ·  Lessig

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet’s nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).

(Read the rest of this insanely long review in the extended entry. You can download a better formatted PDF here.)

Helprin’s thesis is simple and familiar to any intelligent sort who first comes to think about the way the law regulates creative work: that there’s something fundamentally unjust about the law of copyright. While the law protects ordinary property forever — your car, or the land on which your house might sit — the law of copyright protects creative work for a limited time only. At the end of that limited time, the author’s “exclusive right” (as the Constitution puts it) expires, and the work passes into the public domain. Anyone is then free to copy the work, publish the work, translate the work, make a film based upon the work, or publicly perform the work without permission from the original copyright owner.

This difference is odd. As the famous copyright scholar Melville Nimmer put it, “If I may own Blackacre in perpetuity, why not also Black Beauty?” But, as Helprin acknowledged, puzzles notwithstanding, the Constitution seems clear enough. The power Congress has is to “secure” this “exclusive right” “for limited Times” only. Perpetual terms were thus ruled out.

But like an overly precocious child who has figured a way around his father’s injunction “you may take just one cookie” — take one cookie, but five times! — Helprin’s op-ed offered a simple solution to this obvious injustice:

The genius of the framers in making this provision is that it allows for infinite adjustment. Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

To a certain bizarrely diverse community that has developed over the past decade, Helprin’s evasion was simple incitement. It was not even five years since the Supreme Court had upheld Congress’s power to extend the terms of existing copyrights, so long as each extension was “limited.” (A pattern American University Professor Peter Jaszi famously called “perpetual copyright on the installment plan.”) And it was just shy of a decade since Congress had last extended the term of existing copyrights — its 11th such extension in forty years. This was a community that was enormously frustrated by the refusal of Congress to permit the Framers’ bargain — that an author gets an “exclusive right” for some number of years, and then the work enters the public domain — to be executed. The idea that here again someone was calling for yet another term extension was a red cape in front of a bull.

I first read Helprin’s essay while waiting to board a plane from Boston to Frankfurt. At first I wasn’t sure whether he was serious (indeed, a colleague and friend, and strong copyright supporter tells me he routinely reads sections of the op-ed to audiences to see if they can tell whether he’s serious or not). But after becoming convinced that Helprin had simply tripped into this mine field unawares, I posted a suggestion to my blog. As I wrote:

So I’ve gotten (literally) scores of emails about this piece by Mark Helprin promoting perpetual copyright terms. “Write a reply!” is the demand. But why don’t you write the reply instead. Here’s a page on wiki.lessig.org. Please write an argument that puts this argument in its proper place.

Eight hours later, a bit bleary eyed from the relatively sleepless flight, I checked my email. At the top of the list was one that said, “Wow! Pretty amazing wiki article.” I quickly turned to the wiki, and sat astonished to see just what this community had done. Literally hundreds had contributed to pages and pages in reply to Helprin’s op-ed. Some of it was silly. Some of it was great. But in the main, it was a powerful and comprehensive account of the many reasons for this apparent “inequality” at the core of our Constitution.

To be fair to Helprin — and 99% of Americans if they could be brought to think about the matter — there really is something apparently weird about the Constitution’s design. Given the way we regulate ordinary property, it is completely understandable to be ignorant about the justification behind this weirdness. I spent the first five years as a constitutional law professor with no clue about the justifications for this “obvious inconsistency,” as I once described it to my students. “A bit of Karl Marx slipped into an otherwise conservative text,” was how it was described to me.

So I could well understand the intuition that drove Helprin to write as he did, and can even empathize with how he must have felt to see his breezy reflection on copyright policy explode on the New York Times website, and elsewhere. Helprin was ignorant. But it was an understandable, and forgivable, ignorance. The sort all of us have about most things save those few things we spend time trying to understand.

What is not understandable, however, and certainly not forgivable, is everything that has happened since. For in the months since triggering his digital riot, Helprin has been busy penning a book about his digital putdown. And while the ignorance of the essay may be forgiven, the ignorance of the book cannot. There is no excuse for the careless and uninformed screed that Digital Barbarism is.

I don’t know what this is a story about. It might simply be a story about a single author — angry, self-righteous, and oblivious in his solipsism. It might be a story about bad friends. Friends don’t let friends publish books like this.

(The work is filled with passages like: “This is not surprising to me, in that I’ve always run fastest in my oldest shoes.” (211); “At risk of straying too far, I must relate the story of how a long time ago a great friend and I, alighting from a freight train in northern Virginia, proceeded to Crystal City, where we insolently skated in our shoes across an empty ice rink while a Zamboni machine was grooming it, leading to our detention by a security guard with the physique of a whale.” (163); “Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.” (153) (A freezer to fix crashes? Who was the geek who fooled Helprin into that one? No wonder he hates you guys.); “Approaching a buoy where I would make a turn and head back, I looked to my left and saw, on the bank, an idiot was mocking the ancient and unassuming motions of rowing. Evidently unfamiliar with the kind of racing shell that Eakins portrayed and that is a thing of beauty, and perhaps amused that it didn’t have a motor, he was aping my motions and laughing maliciously. After all, how stupid can you be to row five miles in the heat when you might never move a muscle, eat cupcakes and pork rinds all day, smoke like a volcano, and sit in your bass boat hooked up to an oxygen bottle.” (142); “When the MBAs collapse and reorder the structures of the large controlling corporations, people are thrown from them in Dantesque fashion. Some find another publishing boat into which to climb, some go into other fields, some retire, some drink and some die.” (55) (actually, I would think that most die, but that’s just a nit); “Not long ago, on one of those Virginia days that relieves potters of the necessity of firing their kilns, I was rowing on glassy water down the Rivanna River.” (142) (remember, this is a book about copyright policy); “When I was on a team, if we won I would be very quiet on the drive home. This had nothing to do with wisdom, which though I am old I still think I’m too young to claim (and certainly could not have had at age fourteen), but with temperament, because, if you keep your eyes open, the light of triumph is always strong enough briefly to illuminate the darkness that lies ahead and at the end of which is death.” (135); “I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.” (135); “Were I to write the great American novel tomorrow (again?)…” (28); “I have been fighting over commas all my life.” (59); and this my favorite: “Though beset with nuclear anxiety, the nation was at once pre-eminent and at peace, the long chain of proxy wars that would unfold across the century’s second half had just begun, and we were eight years old.” (21).)

Or maybe most troublingly, it is a story about the state of the publishing industry. HarperCollins is no lightweight. Yet this book is riddled with the most basic errors of fact. It would be an embarrassment were it an essay by a first year law student, let alone a major work by (at least what was thought to be) one of America’s greatest novelists. So what exactly does a publisher do anymore? Are there no editors? Is there no one with the power to say to a raving author, “Mr. Helprin, sir, what you’ve said is actually just not correct.”

Like another favorite book of mine (see Andrew Keen’s, The Cult of the Amateur (2007)), this book teases the reader with the delicious hint that possibly it is really just a self-parody. Like Keen, Helprin is railing against the “machine revolution.” (216). The machine is the Internet. Feeding this machine are “armies of blogging-ants steeped in self-righteous anger.” (202)

(The book is filled with this sort of hate: The people Helprin criticizes are “gullible idiots” (66); they represent “a vast reservoir of hostile inanity” (88); they write “subliterate blogs” (127) — unless it is a wiki that they write, in which case they “write the way Popeye speaks, though with less polish” (65); they come from a culture that produces “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps” (57); they are “basically stupid [people] with an advanced degree” (44); they “cannot read, which may mean also that they do not read” (41) (logical enough, that); they are “not sensible people” (41); “quick, massive, muscular, untiring and stupid” (35); “nudniks” (31); appropriately likened to the Unabomber (31); or to “shoplifters” (160). Helprin doesn’t reserve his insults for the nameless “blogging-ants,” either. He says of Duke Professor James Boyle: “Rather than wit, what is apparent here is a desire to appear almost English, an embarrassing phase some insecure colonials enter never to exit.” (107) Actually, Boyle is from Scotland. I’m sure Scotland would not consider itself a colony of England. About a third of the way through this tirade, Helprin actually writes: “I don’t believe in ad hominem attacks unless … the target is the holder of collective or coercive power…” (76) God protect us from the “blogging-ants”!)

The product of this feeding, Helprin suggests, is just so much trash. The work of the Internet is an intellectual waste. No serious reader, or especially writer, should pay any attention to this waste.

But then here’s the astonishing fact about Digital Barbarism: Though the Internet is a waste, though blogs are “subliterate” and wiki’s are written “the way Popeye speaks,” Helprin draws exclusively upon the Internet to form the knowledge he needs to launch his attack. He cites no book, or scholarly article, that might help explain the copyright puzzle that started him on his odyssey. Literally everything he points to to explain the weirdness that is copyright is either a blog, or a wiki, or an essay in an Internet publication.

Now I like the Internet as much as the next guy, and I guess I had never really had to think about the question before. But Helprin has convinced me that you can’t understand the subject of copyright law by simply reading blog posts. To get it, or at least to get it well enough to write a frakking book about it, you’re going to need to read something other than techdirt.com.

You might well wonder, though, at least if you’re not in the center of this debate, how many books about this subject there could actually be? How many scholarly articles? How much attention has been devoted to this relatively obscure clause in the Framers’ Constitution?

The answer is lots, and more interestingly, lots from a wide range of perspectives and political positions. Liberal economists (Kenneth Arrow), and conservative/libertarian economists (Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek). Strongly pro-IP scholars (Paul Goldstein, Melvil