“That’s nice, bye,” the answers would more or less come back—assuming I heard again from people at all. The NII wasn’t just TV-centric. It was Gore-centric. If you lacked his blessing, and his bland letter to me didn’t count, you were dead or at least comatose unless the right word from the White House revived your idea.
Then a “Green Paper” revealing the Clinton Administration’s preliminary views on data highways and copyright came out. It was even more horrid than I could have imagined, an insult to the memory of Andrew Carnegie. The ethos was exactly the opposite of TeleRead’s. For example, if the paper became law, one could not transmit a newspaper article to a few friends; the present ambiguities here would be resolved in favor of the copyright holders. Yes, Washington should not allow anyone to bootleg newspaper stories or magazine items for hundreds of people in an electronic discussion group. In fact, I’d once reported a gross offender to a magazine; I believed passionately in property rights. Clearly electronic books, of all media, should enjoy protection, which, in fact, TeleRead would promote by making piracy less lucrative. But we also had to understand the purpose of copyright law—to help spread information in a democracy and further the progress of science and the arts. Lehman either was disingenuous or had let his old $430,000 make him a little amnesic toward Constitutional tradition.
Ironically, if Lehman’s side won out, writers and journalists would be among the biggest victims of the very law designed to protect us. After all, we were not just producers of information; we were also consumers. To write a book I would absorb millions of words from the Internet, swapping information with friend after friend along the way, including, yes, some electronic newspaper clips. But the Green Paper bizarrely flouted the natural tendency of most people to share. Imagine the effect on teachers and children. Quite rightly, Jim Warren observed that Washington was cheating the public “to avoid controversy among ‘important’ people.”
“The Draft Report comes down firmly on the side of increased rights for copyright owners in all relevant contexts, endorsing the goal of enhanced copyright protection without acknowledging any countervailing concerns,” wrote Jessica Litman, a law professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University. In a reply to the Administration she said of the report: “It appears to be an advocacy document: It at times misrepresents the state of current law, and gives voice to only one side of complicated policy debates.”
Another expert, law professor Pamela Samuelson at the University of Pittsburgh, lambasted the Green Paper in an article for Communications of the ACM, published by the Association for Computing Machinery. She said that “not since the King of England in the sixteenth century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books in exchange for the printers’ agreement not to print heretical or seditious material has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” Contrary to Washington’s claim, the Green Paper was not just a tweaking of existing law but a radical revision in favor of publishers.[[6.44]]
Directly Orwellian questions arose. What about enforcement? How to thwart the ease of mailing copies over the Net? The Green Paper’s designers thought that laws against circumventing copy protection would provide one of the main answers. But in the case of electronic text, such visions were far too sanguine. People would want the capability to print out material, and if they could print it out, they could scan it and put it online again without the protection feature; what’s more, hackers would inevitably develop software to accomplish the same thing electronically.
Yes, the Green Paper would let publishers and others sue makers of devices that could get around copy protection. But just what gear was covered? Scanners? Fax machines? And what kinds of software? What about legitimate programs that also had illicit uses? Were we the new Soviets, living in fear of the digital equivalent of copiers and other subversive gadgets? As William Buckley would write, “fax machines and e-mail outwitted and frustrated even the comprehensive revolutionary orders of Stalin and Mao. This side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, we should have the resources to handle our native bureaucracy.” The Green Paper was nothing more than Big Bureaucracy trying to serve Big Business.
The Green Paper had much in common with Clipper. In both cases bureaucrats were reducing respect for Washington by trying to control the uncontrollable. I was hardly a kneejerker crying out for a pigmy-sized government. My liberalism remained. I favored prenatal nutrition programs, Head Start, public broadcasting, and a host of other wonderful anachronisms from the heyday of the Democrats. And yet here was the Clinton Administration blundering along in the most obnoxious way and turning so many of my fellow liberals on the Internet into libertarians.
If nothing else, the White House was complicating my job of trying to sell the Net on TeleRead. It was not just a question of preempting my idea in favor of an inferior solution rigged up for Clinton’s powerful friends in entertainment and publishing. Like Clipper, the Green Paper was lessening faith in Washington, period—no small concern for somebody advocating a national program such as TeleRead, even one developed with local sensibilities in mind. Sometimes I wondered if Lehman might be a Manchurian Patent Commissioner.[[6.45]] Had the Libertarians brainwashed him to sully Washington’s good name?
Again and again I flamed Lehman’s Green Paper on alt.activism and at least half a dozen other newsgroups on the Internet. I hadn’t any choice. He hated the bytes-want-to-be-free philosophy of TeleRead. Clearly, if Lehman had read TeleRead, it would have driven him nuts, given his apparent belief that copyrighted books must cost readers. TeleRead, on the other hand, would mean fair treatment of copyright holders and library users alike. With a TeleRead-style library, publishers, writers, and private nets could still charge for many categories of information and earn handsome sums from online conferences and other services and products, including customized software to guide people through electronic libraries. Also, they would receive fair royalties for covered material such as books. At the same time, however, thanks to the cost justification provided by the e-forms, we could make electronic books free in this TV-fixated era and thus encourage literacy.