response to Acker

Acker, writing in 1990, managed to write a parable foretelling the millennial rip, mix and burn argument. This is a story about mash ups (and can be extended to subgenres like bastard pop). This is a story about approaches to an information commons. This is a story about derivative works. This is a story about freedom of speech. This is a story calling for the abolition of intellectual property as we know it. This is a story that touches on every pulse of the copyfight.

The question I have is: Where does this story get us? The extreme copyleft viewpoint is seductive, and it has fueled a necessary revolution. However, I’ve come to think it is also largely self-defeating. Stories like this lead us into polarized discourse wherein two diametrically opposed camps develop symbiotic opposition, feeding off of each other’s discourse and further distancing everyone involved. There is no middle ground in the arena, and that leaves no room for resolution, as Capitol’s plight demonstrates. It also situates the participants in a smackdown environment where somebody eventually has to lose -- and that somebody is usually going to be the little person, the one with less hegemonic power.

Both Lessig and Vaidhyanathan have previously fostered this sort of oppositional discourse to varying degrees, and both have recently called for a more moderate approach, one where some sort of actual, fruitful communication can take place. For a bunch of professional argumentarians, we fail (and flail) in our rhetoric. Our rhetoric is what keeps us from being taken seriously in the courtroom, as demonstrated by Lessig himself in his postmortem of Eldred v. Ashcroft. It keeps us from being able to have a rational conversation with the ardent copyrightists, who are themselves not exactly conciliatory. However, they direct their discourse much better than we do, and the A&M v. Napster decision was proof of that. The copyfight movement desperately needs a Lakoff, and in the meantime we need to keep an eye on ourselves. We need to ask ourselves how we can build a conversation about intellectual property that takes into account the demands of the economy, of our capitalist system, and the originator’s need to eat as well as the need for derivative works and more moderate laws. A number of the more prominent copyfighters are beginning to lean this way - William Fisher III’s recent book comes to mind. We grassroots folks are the real, daily, voices of this movement, though. We’re the ones whose civil disobedience brought us this far, and we have a responsibliity at this point not only to that, but also to bringing the discourse around to a point where the real work of change can be done.