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Would America’s founding fathers have anything to say about modern fights over intellectual property? According to Lewis Hyde – poet, essayist, cultural critic—they would say plenty.
Hyde is in Portland this week to discuss his upcoming book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership. Wednesday night he addressed a bursting-at-the-seams crowd of more than three hundred. The event was held, brilliantly, in Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Swigert Commons. So as we listened to his talk about common ownership, we sat in the commons, a huge open area that stands between the individual classrooms. And we were surrounded by a variety of power-to-the-people poster art. I sat near the anti-apartheid wall.
Hyde is best known for his 1983 book, The Gift, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which came out in 2007 (yes, I realize those numbers don’t add up, but it was December of 2007). The Gift is a study of creativity in a market-driven world. I saw two professional artist friends at his talk, and both were raving about this book and urging me to read it. Which I want to, after hearing Hyde speak.
Hyde began by talking about those tyrants of property rights, the Walt Disney Company. Apparently Disney is committed to educating children about copyright law, and has devised a school curriculum that includes role playing games about rights, and distributing copyright stickers for children to put on their artwork and valentines. Disney has also developed and funded a Boy Scout merit badge called “Respect Copyright.”
But there was not always such a tradition of copyright in our country. In his book, Hyde goes back to the founding fathers – James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, et al – to learn what they thought about intellectual property. He read a lengthy quote from Thomas Jefferson:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Or, as Hyde paraphrased, “Once the Pythagorean theorem is at large in the land, it’s hard to keep people out of it.”
Ben Franklin was interested in creative communities. While developing his understanding of electricity, he shared ideas with European scientists. Hyde stressed that without building on earlier experiments, Franklin would not have gotten nearly so far. And Franklin was well aware of this. He refused ownership of his ideas and inventions, calling it an exchange of gifts; since he benefited from the inventions of others, so others should benefit from his.
Hyde is an engaging, accessible speaker. And it’s obvious he loves his subject and admires the thought processes of the founding fathers. As he reads their quotations, he chuckles as if he’s getting a kick out of these guys all over again.
America started to favor individualism about the time Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essays came out in 1841. From then on, self-reliance was in, and collectivism, out.
Hyde pointed out that this was different from the way the ancient Greeks thought. The word “idiot” comes from “idios,” which means to be alone. The Greeks believed in interdependence.
Hyde said he has always been confused about the idea of the self-help movement. “If you hear me yelling ‘help,’” he said, “it means I want you to come to me.”
He discussed Bob Dylan as a modern example of someone who embraces collectivism. Dylan has been very frank about the folk tradition that inspired his songs, including how he adapted melodies. Hyde called Dylan “a great host, someone who is able to invite things into himself in a way that makes him more and more himself.”
Fortunately for Dylan, 1800s folk songs are in the public domain. He is safe from what Hyde describes as “the industry narrative about the theft of music, about how you should not download. Which, by the way, you should not do,” he adds. “You should buy a guitar.”
Hyde will reprise this lecture on Thursday, February 4, 4:00pm at The Templeton Campus Center at Lewis & Clark College.
Image credit Lewis Hyde and IndieBound.
