The question of the moment wasn’t just one of copyright. It was also one of democracy itself, both the decision process and the aftermath. What about the Copyright Gestapo? In the future might the Feds monitor the activities of Republicans more closely than they would those of Democrats? Would Republicans be more susceptible to charges of intellectual piracy when they did the inevitable and tried to share old newspaper clips over the Net? Or vice versa? Would the Democrats suffer discrimination? What about Italy, where the machine-gun-toting cops had invoked software piracy laws against leftist bulletin boards but not against conservative ones? But the Clintonians, so eager to serve their political friends, were just as cavalier toward these possibilities as toward the civil liberties risk of Clipper.
Ultimately the copyright-holders’ victory just might be Pyrrhic. Someday the political terrain could shift and millions of children might grow up on free, government-commissioned books. Or, perhaps instead, videos in too many cases would replace text. So we were better off if, as soon as possible, we used networks to spread privately originated books through a free, well-stocked library system. TeleRead could indeed help many in the information industry. From Lexis-Nexis to Random House, companies could turn profits off dial-up fees, either from works they commissioned directly or from rights they bought from authors. TeleRead wasn’t a threat to information companies if they truly added value such as editing or marketing. Even West could benefit. TeleRead would let Opperman’s company reap many millions off dial-up rights—not only to legal writings but also to other kinds—if the market favored it.
No, the real losers would be the bureaucrats, whose work, after all, would be less in demand in an era of electronic forms in mass use. And even they could have a soft landing. TeleRead would hardly take place instantly, and it would remove much of the scut work from the remaining jobs in government. TeleRead was anti-bureaucracy, not anti-bureaucrat. For the moment, however, as shown by the obtuseness of the GSA man at the hearing, the resistance was there.
Some lessons were emerging. Hundreds of people had e-mailed me for copies of TeleRead. “Even anti-taxers like me would be willing to foot the bill for something so practical and knowledge infectious,” a home schooler in Illinois had said. The head of the Digital Publishing Association, an organization consisting mostly of small publishers and writers, had loved TeleRead. “Instead of flooding the young mind with yet another sitcom or soap,” he had said, “TeleRead would allow video to present them with quality reading materials.” And yet our wishes had not meant squat.
David Lytel, the White House staffer, may have pressed his delete key almost as soon as the TeleRead proposal reached him over the Net. He and his colleagues at the Lehman hearings hadn’t followed up my official testimony with a single question in person or by phone or e-mail. The hearings had been a big farce, a caricature of a public relations exercise. I might as well have been Winston Smith deviating from the plot and making a few friendly suggestions to one of Big Brother’s TV cameras. No one would shoot or torture me for saying the wrong things, but on the major NII issues the Clinton people were about as open as Big Brother to ideas from below, Net or no Net.
I wasn’t the only writer with a few feelings on the subject of Executive listening skills in this networked era. A New York Times columnist later told how cavalier the White House crowd had been toward the e-mail from her. I’d actually gotten farther than she had. At least Gore had sent me a higher class of boilerplate. Perhaps that was because I had actually used conventional rather than electronic mail, and had enclosed a photocopy of a TeleRead article from the Washington Post. Article or not, however, the White House had thumbed its nose at me. While Clinton and Gore couldn’t reply to every citizen, the composition of the citizens’ advisory council had made clear what the NII priorities were, even in the age of Cyber Socks: Big Government serving Big Business.
Clinton-Gore had better change if they wanted my vote in ’96. Rather than just sharing Sock’s meows and feeling ever so smug about high-tech democracy, they needed to spend time more listening to us nonlobbyists and a little less time keeping Vance Opperman happy. Democracy should not mean just a dialogue between the White House and the usual “stakeholders.”
As is obvious by now, intrusive government officials love to fixate on net.sex. But something else is happening as shown in the next chapter: net.love. Let’s hope that Exon and company can tell the difference.