 So these are two 19th-century remarks. What am I? My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces, childhood maturity and old age have all brought me their thoughts, their perspectives on life. I've often reaped what others have sown. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe. This is from the 1830s. About ten years later in this country you get Emerson. I chose this because I'm going to talk a little about Franklin. Here's Emerson. Insist on yourself. Never imitate of the adopted talent of another. You have only an extemporaneous half-possession. Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? Every great man is unique. So the question here is how do you imagine the self? How do you imagine your own person? Your subjectivity? Are you an individual and a unique? Or are you somehow a collective? A common thing. I think myself that we are always both of these and that in a way it's a false distinction. But the American story of self-reliance and self-making arises from that distinction. And for at least almost 200 years has assumed the individualist Emersonian response. And my idea here is that our protocols around intellectual property do this as well. That they enable our individualism and disable various forms of what might be called collective being. So therefore you could talk about, you know, Jamie Boyle has this nice phrase that what we are seeing is the second enclosure. That is the enclosure of the cultural commons by a kind of push to propertize intellectual property. And that often this is cast in terms of incentives and money but you could also cast it in terms of that opposition to this could be cast as a defense for certain kinds of, certain ways of being human, certain ways of practicing our lives. And so I'm going to flesh this out with two examples and beginning with a kind of life or livelihood called being a scientist. And what I've been working on mostly is Benjamin Franklin to give me an armature in which to hang this material. And with Franklin and others I begin with the assumption that creativity in science is always cumulative and collaborative or almost always. It proceeds collectively and it flourishes therefore the barriers to collectivity are reduced. So to illustrate this with Franklin, Franklin's key contribution to science was a theory of electricity. This is 1750s. This is a part of a pamphlet that published in London that contained the letters that he had written to a friend named Collins and that lays out this theory. From it his most useful invention I think is the lightning rod from the theory. The theory helps figure out why lightning rods might work. So how did Franklin work? How did he come to this, these ideas? He was a smart guy. But none of this, none of what he did was the work of a solitary genius. To begin with Franklin's experimentation was highly social. You know his equipment came from friends. More to the point, he was one of four guys in Philadelphia who they set up a workshop in the upstairs rooms of the Pennsylvania State House and he may have been the smartest guy in this group but nonetheless the work was collaborative. There were three other people, a man named Philip Singe, Thomas Hopkinson, Ebenezer Kinnersley. So the electrical theory comes out of a laboratory. And not only that but this laboratory worked with an inherited tradition. These guys stood on the shoulders of giants. A few examples. One is 1745 I think is the invention of the Leiden jar. Two different people in Europe independently invented this. The guy at the University of Leiden published it so he gets to call it the Leiden jar. This is actually a battery of six Leiden jars. The Leiden jar was the first condenser. It was the first device with which you could store up an electrical charge. And it made possible electrical experimentation. So if Franklin hadn't done it, somebody else would have. But almost immediately Franklin gets a Leiden jar and this group of his and he work with it and begin to figure out how electricity works. Second thing, these guys swam in an emergent scientific culture. Franklin had read Newton's optics. This is the one book Newton wrote in English. The Wikipedia was in Latin and Franklin didn't read it. Jefferson did. Franklin didn't. But he had read the optics and Newton's optics ends with a bunch of queries which are unsolved problems that he opposes. Prairie 21 has an idea that ether, like our air, may contain particles which endeavor to recede from one another. So it's typical. A brief remark. Bernard Cohen used to be a philosopher of science here. Cohen believes that this remark enables Franklin's group with this along with Newton's atomism to assume about electricity that is elastic fluid that could spread out on any conducting body because it consisted of mutually repelling particles. And there are many other examples. The point is simply that he's in a world of scientific discourse. People were very fond of William Harvey's demonstrations about the circulation of the blood. That came into the electrical theory. Newton's ideas about statics, about the way forces come into equilibrium, that came in. Finally also, it was a culture that believed in open communication. These people wrote letters to each other all the time. There was an emerging proto-scientific journal culture coming. And for one example, there had been a group of scientists in Germany who had experimented with static electricity and come up with some ideas, published their results in a French scientific journal. It had been translated into English, published in Boston, Franklin and his group in Philadelphia read it. It gives them a lot of the terms they use for the idea of electrifying something they take from this paper. So, you know, in a sense, to my mind, this should be obvious that this is how all scientists work, that it is collaborative and cumulative. And yet, we have Emerson asking, where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? A rhetorical question that is patently crazy if you happen to know how the man actually worked. But that is what persists. This assumption of a mind that works best when stripped of tradition and community. The mind of a child in nature. This is Benjamin Rush's image of Franklin's famous kite experiment. And what I love here is the pootie he's surrounded by babies, basically. On the left lower, you actually see some Leiden jars. I think this may be a battery of Leiden jars. The word battery was invented by Franklin for this use, by the way. But here is Currier and Ives. This is 1876. And what's interesting about this, so Franklin tells the story about how he did the kite experiment to priestly who publishes it. Franklin never published it as a story. And he was with his son when he did it. So Currier and Ives picked this up. There's a Leiden jar on the ground and he's with his son. But the picture is historically inaccurate because William Franklin at the time was a grown man. He wasn't a boy as he is in this. So the image is half-truth. Unless he was... We have data on that too, John. We've opened the crypt. So why is Franklin out with a child? Or why does Benjamin Rush have him with his pootie? This is Emerson again. It's part of the mythology out of the romantics in Emerson that you might have a child in nature who could have an original relationship to truth unmediated by society. So in these images you get Franklin stripped of his sociability and represented as the American boy-man, the idiot savant who writes no letters to scientists in London. Just to finish this off. We want to dwell on that one. But in a way, these are the aggressions because to try to say that science is collaborative and cumulative, it seems so obvious and yet you do have to say it because we have this other tradition of the individual genius. So to go on, I want to say something more about the 18th century ethic of open communication. This arises in particular from the conception of the truth and how you find out the truth. And it's interesting to see this in terms of or to parallel it with Franklin's position on the ownership of ideas because they go hand in hand. So when Franklin first communicates what he's been doing in Philadelphia to friends in London, he says, I'm doing it partly because it may not be right. So this is a letter to this pal of his Collinson in London. These thoughts, my friend, are many of them crude and hasty. And if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some reputation, I ought to keep them by me till corrected and improve by time and further experience. But since even short hints and imperfect experiments in any new branch of science being communicated have often times a good effect in exciting the attention of the ingenious to the subject and so becoming the occasion of more exact dispositions and more complete discoveries, you are at liberty to communicate this paper to whom you please. It being of more importance that knowledge should increase than that your friend should be thought an accurate philosopher. So Franklin understands as many do that scientific claims don't depend on particular scientists. The collective inquiry is less prone to error than solitary individualism. Individualism in this case being actually an impediment to knowledge. So the phrase to mark in this letter is at liberty to communicate. You know, for Franklin and this sociable community, the breeding ground of truth lies in the conversation of the ingenious not or not only in the ambitions of individuals. So this sense that in science at least truth and individualism might be at odds, these lie also at the base of Franklin's ethic in regard to the ownership of ideas and inventions. So Franklin famously declines a patent when offered a patent on his wood stove. And this is how he puts it in the autobiography. As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours and this we should do freely and generously. So this is the assertion of a collective being. That is of somebody who understands that my invention comes out of a community of knowledge and therefore in some sense I cannot own it. And there's a question about incentive that comes up here because of course one rationale for offering the monopoly privilege of a patent grant is that it will be an incentive to inventors and that clearly is the case and also a kind of remarkably narrow sense of incentive of what impels people to do this kind of work. And a second remark of Franklin's about owning ideas opens this up. This is a 1777 letter to a friend in Paris. He says, I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions. This was people attacked Franklin's electrical theory and he refused to defend it and this is a typical expression of the rationale. If these theories are right truth and experience will support them. If they are wrong they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one's temper. I love that. I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world having never made no propose to make the least profit by any of them. You know it's hard actually there wasn't such a thing as intellectual property and so it's a kind of excavation here to try to figure out what Franklin would have thought. Well this is a clear place where he says I have not I don't have a private interest. That is to say I don't have a patent here. I'm not making a profit and he connects it to a particular style of social inquiry into the truth. So the issue here is not so much indebtedness to past inventors which is in the other statement but something closer to care of the soul. To patent an invention confers a private interest and such interest he implies will prompt a man to defend his ideas whether they are right or wrong and the disputes that don't care for right or wrong sour the temper. Or to put this another way disidentifying with your own ideas that is to say not claiming them as exactly your own leads to a valued way of being. One that where quiet and sweet temper arise from associating with truths that lie outside of the self. Now I don't have time to take each of these things I'm going to do with Franklin and re-inscribe it onto present context but I promise to remark about John Solston. Solston has a book called The Common Thread which Solston was one of the group that did the human genome project and his book The Common Thread is a description of that project and it's built around an opposition between his part of the undertaking which was publicly financed by the Wellcome Trust and by the National Institutes of Health and the private enterprise Solera which was privately funded and of course one of them is an open source science and the other is commercial science that has a secretive commercial aspect to it. And Solston's position in that book is you cannot do science the way he would like to do science in the second of those ways that you have to have these protocols of non ownership of ideas if you want to be a scientist. So I think you can read what Franklin does into present moment and find it to illuminate in any event to summarize what I'm trying to say about Franklin that Franklin believes that the truth is a conversation not in solitude and that to see him as a genius is right he's a very smart guy but the genius is not the genius of individualism it's the genius of a man who has a talent for letting others inhabit his mind he is the big reader of that generation he's a host to a scientific community out of which can come new theories so Franklin could say as Goethe says that the work is the work of a collective being that in this case bears the name of Franklin so that's part one is to talk about ways of leading our lives and the first one is being a scientist and this is how Franklin would have thought it the second one is what if you want to be a citizen in the public sphere what if that's the kind of collective being you want so begin by saying in the 18th century in Franklin's day it was common for a gesture of self erasure to accompany someone's entry into public discourse self erasure quite specifically it was common first of all to publish anonymously or with a pseudonym sometimes done to avoid charges of sedition and being thrown in jail but that wasn't the only reason in many cases Franklin's is a good one where that was not an issue at all more often it was a rhetorical gesture to publish anonymously it's a kind of ritual move meant to indicate that the writer has an ambition to speak impartially and so anonymous pamphlets in the 18th century typically have in them at the beginning a declaration of how as I'm writing this I am trying to lay aside all partial views all personal ends and trying to speak for the public good there's a little poem about Franklin from 1756 that describes him as somebody void of all partial and all private ends so this is the ethic to try to get away from partiality or this is Tom Payne Common Sense 1777 and Payne publishes this anonymously people figure out soon who wrote it but that's a different thing to have the public describe your name to it is different from you describing it and actually they didn't figure out right away the first thought Franklin had written this but Payne writes it and this is a typical Payne's remark in the beginning of it is a typical of this self eraser gesture in the following sheets the author has studiously avoided everything which is personal who the author of this production is is wholly unnecessary to the public as the object for attention is the doctrine itself not the man so in science I said there was a model of the true how do you figure out the true in this public discourse there's a model of how the good is to be found out and it lies behind this rhetoric it borrows on the scientific ethic in both cases the assumption is that individuals alone don't usually have access to the good and the true that each man and woman always has a partial view and the phrase is nicely doubled that is your opinion is partial in the sense that it is only fragmentary and also that you have an interest you know that you stand some place with an interest and a limited view so no matter how self made or how self taught or how self reliant you are you can't escape this partiality so thus we regularly hear in these writings the call to sacrifice private opinion in favor of something less partial and more common and remark about this word opinion opinion in the 18th century is a sort of middle term between truth and falsity it refers well we would call it belief now it refers to things that you think are true but that cannot be determined by experimentation or sense data or reason or something so opinion always belongs to individuals and it's found where individuals are found whereas true knowledge in this epistemology doesn't suffer from that kind of contingency Newton in one of I don't remember where but he has rules for reasoning for philosophers and he's at one point in he says the cause of the falling of stones should be the same in Europe as in America and it should be the same no matter what scientist tries to describe these cause so you know that's a difference of that's an image of non contextual truth or non contingent truth whereas opinion is always contextualized local individual and can't be detached the way that that can consequently opinion is also divisive that to the degree that truth doesn't depend on particular truth tellers it can lead to concord we could all agree but opinion produces sects and factions so it makes it difficult to move from any group of private selves to the public good if you're in your opinions so in public discourse regarding the public good therefore you get this language of self erasure the value placed on the suspension of partial views and to do this with Franklin this is I love the web you can just get these images but right here is from a photograph no this is constitutional convention 1787 the gather in Philadelphia to finally write the document Franklin is very old he's 81 at the time had a kidney stone he could feel move when he turned over that's why he's sitting down so late in the proceedings Franklin rises to make one of the few speeches that he makes during this convention and it's a remarkable remarkable speech it's a speech asking the delegates to approve the constitutional draft unanimously and he begins by doing this stuff about opinion he says that he has doubts himself about the constitution but that he doubts his own doubts he says long life has shown him that he's obliged to change opinions even on most important and then he contrasts his own professed fallibility around his beliefs with other people who stick to their opinions no matter what and he begins to joke about such people so you know the point of the self deprecation and his humor is to begin to prod the other delegates into the kind of self spirited public spirited self abnegation and Franklin then proceeds to model for them so to my mind the key sentence in this speech that Franklin gives is this one where he says I think there are things wrong with this but then after going through the logic of his own position he says I consent to this constitution the opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good so what he's doing is performing this ritual by which a group of opinionated private citizens might be converted into the founders of the republic each must doubt his own doubt so that all might sign the final draft and he says make manifest our unanimity but of course there is no unanimity it becomes it becomes unanimous as they do it that is he calls it into being and asking them to give up their partial booze and in their doing so you can see how in the 18th century our foundational public documents came into being so let me come back to my point of departure for the 18th century at least self sacrifice is constitutive of citizenship in the public sphere it means that as with the claims in science the citizen does not or cannot own his or her ideas or to put this conversely where this sort of self erasure has no standing where for example all writers claim their work to be their own take pride in its individual voice and guarded against appropriation it will be more difficult to create a lively public sphere and to call an entity such as we the people into being I'm almost done but I want to um speak of two ways well you know I tried to lay out two examples of sort of public collective being scientist or citizen and I mean close by underscoring this last one about citizenship um with two details from our own day one which matches this 18th century practice and the other one doesn't the question would be can you come up go back to here um with a case in which self erasure in public utterance enables a a valued way of being um that is making yourself available for appropriation disowning your stuff other ways in which it makes you empowers you in public life and my own example that intrigues me comes out of legal writing in the law um when judges issue opinions they often plagiarize from the briefs presented by the contending parties Benjamin Cardozo I promised he would appear in this talk supposedly plagiarize the Roosevelt administration's brief in his decision upholding the social security system but of course the word plagiarism is the wrong term here for authorship in the law is not the authorship for which copyright was designed you know legal writing tends to be collaborative produced by writing communities you can't own it you can't claim a copyright in it the opposite is actually the case if you are writing a brief you would like it to be appropriated and I mean this there's a fellow named Peter Friedman who teaches at Case western reserve in Cleveland who did a paper on this that I'm using to flesh this out and Peter says I knew I had written the best brief I possibly could on a motion when the court's opinion announced its decision was directly cut and pasted from my brief without attribution that is it just this is the protocol so this is the case in which appropriation is to be desired it makes you a lawyer the non ownership of the work is constitutive of a way of being human a way of having a public life so I use this because it's modern because it makes a good example of the problem of categories around which this talk is somewhat organized the category lawyer is enabled by treating the law as a commons and it would be disabled if the work were proprietary and let me juxtapose this to a case in which I think the categories are confused here we must briefly leave PowerPoint we will be back in a minute we need this sound I think I have sound do you have sound this doesn't work without the sound no it was my problem it was my problem okay boys and girls I hope you are adequately disgusted alright so the Martin Luther King estate holds the copyright to the dream speech and the estate in particular King's son Dexter Scott King charges fees to scholars and public broadcasters to use the work and as we have just seen licenses it for commercial use in 1993 when a newspaper printed the text of the speech the estate sued for infringement and won come back to my point of departure our practices around cultural property allow us to be certain kinds of cells by them we enable or disable certain ways of being human there are practices around public discourse which constitute us as commercial beings with partial views and other practices constitute us as public citizens what Dexter Scott King has done is to move his father from one category to another it is a form of patricite so oh no I promised I would end with Bob Dylan this is a remark from Dylan's autobiography I came across one of Rambo's letters it's actually a letter that contains this line which translates as I as someone else made perfect sense someone would have mentioned that to me earlier this is from Rambo they called it the seer letters it has this other remark it is wrong to say I think one should say I am thought Rambo is interested in sort of deconstructing the bourgeois ego and these are two examples of it so let me end by setting this talk in general in the context of my larger project which is what I am trying to do is to take materials out of American history and in order to reframe the way we speak about cultural property and cultural commons we all know that the dominant frame coming from the entertainment industry is that cultural property is owned thus vulnerable to piracy and theft against that frame the example of a man like Franklin suggests that we treat cultural property as a commons so as to enable creative and cumulative creativity and also to enable citizenship that's my talk I left a silent room thinking about Ben Franklin no doubt I ask let me go back to your lawyer who submits a brief which the judge uses and the lawyer is happy now in the old days you would submit a paper copy of your brief to the court and the court would read it and put it in their files and that was basically it nowadays Lexis and Westlog go around and they collect these briefs submit it electronically and they post them on their databases and another lawyer in another state who's got a similar case finds the brief online and he says well that's a great brief I couldn't do better than that myself and he just takes the whole thing and he puts it in his brief is that proper? if he does it conform his client that he's done it I mean in one sense if you have an obligation to represent your client to the best of your ability the best of your ability is somebody else's brief you're almost obligated to do it there was a lawyer who did this and got slapped upside the head by the court because he charged full rates for it he charged as much time as if he'd written it from scratch and now there's attempts by lawyers knowing that this is going on to copyright the briefs which I think are not getting very far so the context is the context has changed it's probably you know to be desired and permissible for the court to use it because you've sent it to the court but is it permissible for somebody not part of that original conversation to come in I think John wants to may I pile on to that which may complicate the question you're supposed to answer? yes I suppose that's right but amplify in certain ways which is one of the fairly common things to do in the internet law perspective is to cut and base somebody else's privacy policy or somebody else's terms of service I have these all the time one of the things that Millie is doing through the clinical program and the partnership with Stanford and others is to come up with a terms of service generator which would do this in a way that would be intentionally giving it away to come up with some best practice type things that you could then slip in so only by way of sort of messing around the question well you know there are lawyers in the room I think who could speak to this better let me say the context in which I think about your question part of Peter Friedman's thesis in this his essay about how lawyers write is that it's less persuasive to appeal to authority in a brief that is to say your brief should have the law and your argument and evidence and so forth but if you try to lean on so and so said this and therefore it's true it weakens your brief so again my talk has to do with how you conceive of the self and in this case there's a sense that the truth in a legal argument is not contingent upon the person who utters the statement and so the protocol disembeds the utterance from the utterer so it would be appropriate I mean what's wrong in the case of the person who bills for doing this is not the appropriation what's wrong actually is the hours and it changes the you know if it took him 10 minutes to cut and paste it he should have just charged for 10 minutes and said I appropriated it which is what we do in the law if instead he said I wrote it from scratch and it took me 8 hours what he's done is commercialize what was the public domain so I mean my further terms of identity the lawyer is not writing his opinion he's making an argument on behalf of this client you could make an argument that the brief is actually a work for hire and if there is a copyright it is owned by the client and the client may be perfectly happy for the judge to say I join my view is the same as your view and he's not going to object if the judge takes what his lawyer has written and puts it in his opinion but he might object of some other lawyer and some other state but again the background issue here is is the law and language around the law are commons that we all participate in or can it be privatized in this way and I mean the parallel issue would be the west publications case west publications published legal findings for decades and had a system of indexing it to make sure that they controlled how you got to the law because they owned the index and in a case in the 1990s they were finally beaten back on that but it's an attempt to take the law private and the same would be true if you're writing a brief and you copyright it and begin to so to my mind maybe there's an argument for doing it but to do it simply it's only federal law that is not copyrightable state law is copyrightable by the state let's throw this out more widely one just to follow up on that point without too much there's actually coming to a head in the court system certain law firms have been patenting their tax strategies for clients in terms of setting up tax shelters and things of that nature and I think probably in the next couple of years we'll see a case as to whether that type of legal advice and strategizing is patentable but again the larger question here is which category is this stuff in and to the degree that it's part of public discourse and that that's a value we want to maintain then the non-ownership is part of how you understand that and appropriation is understood in a different way appropriation is actually something to be valued not something to be guarded against that was great and I so many questions I'm not even so here's one it's tough to choose I'm so happy to have reduced it massive clivering jello anonymity now has very different forms I was really striking to hear that anonymity was a way of people presenting themselves without attempting to get past the self whereas much more commonly at least it seems on the internet now anonymity is used as a way to be highly voiced, highly partisan so much yourself and so rooted in your own interests that you're afraid of exposing who you are because you'll be attacked for those interests in fact the notion that anonymity is a way of presenting impartial truth is so far into how we think of it now that it's hard even to see what the connection is that we get from impartial impartiality to strip your name off it seems like a really formal sort of connection so I'm sort of heading towards the question in the same way that you've talked about what attitude we take towards how we understand the commons is a way of determining who we are what sort of beings we are what do you say about what we now make of anonymity what does that tell us about who we are and our relationship to through our connection with truth is that too vague? No it's a good question and I'm not sure I have a good answer for it I mean I think you're right that anonymity now to the degree that I want to flame out on the internet if I can erase myself and just do it anonymously so it's almost anonymity is connected to opinion whereas in the 18th century it seemed to be connected to the erasure of opinion or to maybe Franklin's move at the convention is a nice compromise because it's clear he says I do this so he he names himself and yet I sacrifice my opinions in order to try to move into something more global so it's a combination of this anonymous and I guess here's the one remark I would make I'm fond of this joke in which the rabbi in the synagogue has a fit of spiritual passion in front of the author and he falls down and says lord I'm nobody I'm nobody and then the cantor does the same thing and then the janitor is inspired and lord I'm nobody and the cantor pokes the rabbi and says look who thinks he's nobody and what's wonderful about it is it reveals the fact that in order to be nobody you got to be somebody so there's a sequence here in which you have to first have public presence before you can erase it and I think this was there are many trap doors in this talk which I have tried to hide but one of them is has to do with how you had the public presence in the 18th century such that you could perform the ritual of erasing your public presence so famously women, Native Americans, slaves, blacks aren't they're like the janitor in the joke they don't have the somebodiness to become the nobody who can then go on to become a public somebody and so maybe what I'm doing with this is to say I think probably it simplifies it even the 18th century case to say that anonymity is as simple as I did it that anonymity actually follows something else which is some kind of presence in citizenship after which you do this so maybe then you would have to ask is there a kind of anonymity on the web in which somehow you are established you have a website which has certain authority people on this website have been vetted in some way to speak I don't know how you would do it but what your question does is to make me complicate 18th century anonymity sorry so when I think about literary culture in relation to the questions you're asking and particularly the history of writers talking about giving their work up to the public or being intensely possessive it seems to me at least over the last 200 years there's no obvious correlation between great writing and a strong possessiveness or a strong self-sacrifice in other words there are a lot of great writers who were very free with their work and you talk about it in the exact terms that you describe and a lot of writers who are obsessed with who invent examples of other people plagiarizing them and try to micromanage their publishing arrangements and that sort of thing but in the recent past like say the last 30 years it seems to me the most vociferous complaints about literary pillaging by others on the part of writers generally comes from writers who seem to be really bit players in the literary scene usually when you look at what it is they're complaining has been plagiarized by and large recently it's something that's barely worth plagiarizing it seems to me where's that coming from where do they get this language I'm inclined to think that it comes from the creative writing classroom where they're taught to be themselves that's the idiom that they think they're developing as they're learning to be writers and so I'm positing that maybe there's something about the way creative writing is taught that encourages writers to think today in much more strongly possessive terms and I just wonder if you think that's right, if you think there's a way of teaching creative writing that doesn't involve inculcating that you I mean I take it when you teach writing that you don't inculcate that you so obviously the answer to that would be yes I guess some stories about whether or a you think I've got the right diagnosis for how this has come about and b you know how to keep that from catching on to it I don't know I think you're right first of all that the quality of the writing is unrelated to one's position in this that some writers are happy to have their work appropriated this Jonathan Lethem piece that I pointed people towards you know he's a great writer and doesn't have any problem with people as long as they you know there's certain ground rules but I don't know I mean my own feeling is that this is older than the creative writing classes that it really is comes out of Emersonian 19th century individualism and in a sense of how I guess the other thing on my mind about this is I think in the background a lot of this is the puzzle of how a writer makes a living and that a lot of right that this is not been solved and a lot of writers have been led to believe that they're gonna make their living with their copyrights and this is like you know some ghetto kid thinking he's gonna be a great basketball player I mean a few people do it but it's not you shouldn't build your hopes on it and so a lot of us who write and try to make a living doing it are nervous around this stuff and think oh if only they wouldn't plagiarize me I would make a living um so then you have to turn to things like Terry Fisher's proposals for different kinds of renumeration and how we support authors in this country but I would be hard pressed to do a causative description of who worries about this and who doesn't it's gonna be late um but I you talk about this is a new kind of it's like a public voice there's a private voice and a public voice and that public voice what are the historical origins that what you're calling anonymous in a sense is actually you have you have a different identity you have multiple identities and part of them is the individual but there is a sense of this few sort of public voice what are the historical origins of that is that sort of something that comes where you wouldn't agree with that it's different than anonymous it's interesting I think David made a really good point about contrasting the two but there seems to have been frankly knew there was another voice so you take yourself out of the voice you assume another voice which is a public voice which is something we really don't have the vocabulary for and was that a derivative of some of a gentry notion of a sort of a public role versus a private role or is that one line of thought about this again it's complicated but one line of thought is that this arises with print culture and particularly with the freeing of the press from control by the authorities the king of and particularly I mean the example I use in this chapter I've written about Franklin is Steele and Addison's Journal of the Spectator and the spectator is a character and in the first issue of that Addison presents himself as the spectator and it's a particular kind of public person and what he does he says well he says people today when they read an essay they want to know who the author is you know is he an angry guy or a quiet guy and is he married or not and so forth and the essay pretends it's about to tell you all this but it totally doesn't tell you anything you learn less and less about this guy and he says and he begins to present himself kind of like a character in Poe somebody who walks through the streets participating in everything but not visible to anybody and in a certain sense what it is is a persona based on print which is silent and invisible and present every place and he finally says you know during my years in college I've never heard more than a sentence out of me but I hope by the end of my life to write out my life now let me tell you one other quick thing about this Franklin when he was a boy taught himself to write by imitating the essays from the spectator and then famously he put anonymous essays under his brother's newspaper print shop door the first one of these is a complete rip off from the spectator it says well you're going to wonder who I am I'll tell you and then it doesn't tell him and it's all about reading and writing and print so the persona is in a sense it's somebody like Addison who could write without having to sign his name exactly in public print and then have it circulate in town so this is one answer is that it has to do not just with the rise of print culture but with the rise of the kind of print culture which has been freed of government control and in fact Franklin's paper I don't know if you know this but papers in London up until through the 17th century were all published by authority they had to put this right on the masthead and papers in the colonies were too this was not a free press the first newspaper in Boston was printed by authority it was only you had to get it and Franklin's brother was thrown in jail for printing stuff and Franklin's brother's paper was the first not by authority paper and so that's also part of it you're not only in this print culture that way but you are free of authority general face of dilemma which is how we need to deal with the relationship between individuality and sociability so on the individuality part in order to we are persons in order to be a person we need to have a self we need to have a private life but there's also a sociability part you cannot develop your freedom without others protecting your freedom you are only able to develop freedom in a social setting but it's right so there's a dilemma here the more you participate in a public life the less individual individual you will be because there are so many many coercions somewhere in the public sphere but if you don't participate in a social life there is no because your personal freedom is only could only be developed in a social setting if you don't participate in a public life you are not a person because you don't have freedom so there's a dilemma so it strikes me that your project is kind of intended to erase the individual that already part of social human life you emphasize a lot about sociability so it's kind of you know can I ask you what culture you grew up in Chinese culture yeah so I'm imagining that's a forced sociability culture yes there are many many coercions well you know I mean you're speaking exactly to the dilemma first of all I mean I began by saying I think both of these things are true that we need individualism and you need this sociability to the degree that I over emphasize sociability is because individualism is not endangered at the moment and but as you talk I mean I have a couple of thoughts I mean one is you say we need to develop a self I think that's true I also think a lot of our discourse around this begs the question what the self is and that it is in a way what you got into was how complicated it is to think about what the self is and how do we imagine ourselves and how do we go back and forth between being the somebody in private who can disassociate from the collective and like the Ralph Nader film being an unreasonable man and how do we also participate in the fact of our sociability and not erase it and I actually the chapter I've written about Franklin is actually built around that joke about look who thinks he's nobody because I think that Franklin's solution to this was humor that what Franklin does is Franklin famously in the autobiography says he tried to get rid of vanity and he couldn't do it and what he did he says if I had become humble I would have been proud of my humility so that line is a joke about the impossibility of it and what he does whenever he was simultaneously an incredibly vain man and an incredible public servant and what you see him doing often when these two things when he's getting into one role and losing the other is to joke about it so I suspect that humor is the key and if there's no humor in Chinese culture it's a sign of its decadence and if there's no humor in the entertainment industry position on intellectual property it's a sign of its hegemony just two thoughts on this the economic line of thinking which I think he calibrates but then maybe discard as well to some extent a sort of incentive theory here and one thing that struck me as I was listening to the Franklin example is I think as you're building the argument you're presumably up against the notion that in 1770 whatever Franklin was a wealthy man and for him a patent wasn't necessarily going to incentivize him because Ayers wanted him to it seemed to me that was a vulnerability to the framing although a wonderful story and the other sort of second one is you were talking about yourself as an author and so forth that was reminded of our colleague who was working in social networking in the extent to which there is as you well know a huge unsubble question around user-generated content and mashups and so forth in the context of video social networks you've got YouTube fighting against lots of takedown notices on the one hand seeking to cut deals with large as you said hegemonic players but then there's also this sort of some large percentage of stuff where people are doing mashups that the copyright isn't particularly well settled and I wondered if any of this led you to have a view on that on that topic that sort of normative view Well Franklin's wealth is another trap door that I tried to hide here and so you found it No but it's the case Franklin didn't need the money so that caused him to question well you know it repositions his argument and I have actually searched the Franklin papers are online right now it's a wonderful resource and I have searched for everything he possibly could have said about patent and copyright and I find one case in which he some people want to emigrate to the United States he says he thinks the legislature could give them a patent for their method of dying wool or something for seven years what's interesting about the case is that these people are industrial pirates they're leaving Britain with against the British laws importing information that they're not allowed to so it's simultaneously an argument for a short term property right in a patent and for piracy of British technology you know as for I mean like the YouTube case I mean I think in a certain sense part of the whole point of the Bergman center is that this is a live wire right now that we are in a period when suddenly the ground of copying has changed so radically that the old rules don't work and that there's something of value to keep that the old world rules managed such as income for people to write books and make videos and there's something of value to to keep in this emerging technology one of which is this astounding ability this is all covered by fair use but I was able to grab a lot of stuff immediately like the King video off the net and and it's much better and yes exactly you know your heart you know you thought whoa and you know I would like what I end up writing to to preserve this balance I mean I think it is important for you know one of the arguments in favor of copyright that I believe in is that part of its origin was to begin to establish a group of people independent of patronage and and a group of publishers independent of government authority and you only get that if those people in this economy have some income of their own and the publishing houses have income in their own so I'm not interested in seeing for Arshtas and Giroud lose its income streams or me losing mine at the same time there's something else here of value to and you know the whole problem that we all face is where to find the balance and how to how to draw the line and when we talk about the second enclosure we're talking about cases where it seems clear that the proprietary rab has gone over some not only boundary that would make the internet more useful but old boundaries that made public discourse lively and you know these there's a piece in today's Times by Michael Crichton about the patenting forms of life and you know there's just example of example after example of or this commercialization of King's speech I mean what a sacrilege of of commerce appearing where we thought that there was a question so your question was not exactly pointed so my answer has been sort of unpointed also there so follow up normative question are you calling for you seem to like the 18th century way of proceeding that the selfless suppression of the self-racing of the self in order to enable a conversation to go forward from which truth emerges you seem to speak favorably of that are you recommending a return to or is are we passed that in a way that it can't be retrieved and if so then how is the way towards truth that's all a simple question well you know I I'm using this history not in a not to try to prove something historically but as a way of engaging the imagination around these questions and particularly in this case around the question of how we imagine the self and I don't think you can go back to the 18th century but I think you can problematize the easy use of the sense of what the self is and that the 18th century provides one of the one way of opening up the question and I don't think it's simply 18th century to say that we are collective beings as well as private beings I think that's the fact about everybody but I think that it's it's often the ignored fact and so the reason I did those little images of Franklin with the kite is because that's the popular imagination and it's it erases this other part of Franklin and I think in general that happens with everybody you can take example after example of people being perceived only in terms of their individuality and not perceived in terms of their collectivity I mean I but you dropped down a level which you do in your discussion of what it means to be an 18th century public person self a public person, a scientist, somebody who's heading towards truth it's not all what you're saying sounds like it's standing in distinction at that level not at the level of we're collective as well as private because I think everybody actually despite the emphasis on individualism that's nothing to a lot about position on that I don't think it's the nature of the degree to which the ways in which we're collective and the ways in which truth it's sort of a metaphysical relationship to truth also that's its take at that level of detail do we return to the 18th century or are we inventing and becoming a different type of collective self, a different type of private self, a different relationship to truth well I guess partly you could give the materialist answer here that it's going to be return to the 18th century maybe for some inspiration but it's going to be different because this is not a print culture anymore it's this emerging internet worldwide web culture and it's going to have different self formations around what's available as the tools of communication like when I thought why you were I forget I'd like to pick up on that because I think there's sort of there's a dualism and enlightenment that you create and we seem to at least the discussion you're talking about the individual self versus the collective self and in fact I think what's also coming out of this is that there is sort of a third category there's another voice and that may be a post enlightenment mentality there's something else coming out I was just in New York yesterday talking to a friend who does a lot in the financial world and he does a lot in derivatives and there's a huge debate going on now and saying all the traditional assets classes like securities and equities and things like that they are not looking good because there's a whole new class of derivatives which are composites of those that are changing the valuations where the real value is at another level and it's the same thing that happened to money there's sort of a whole new emergent layer that's coming out of and so the sourcing, the original just the original materials already have a value in fact the new value is how they synthesize into something else you may have said I knew there you might jump up and jerk but it is an emergent property and you see that through identity and the web of course this isn't made up of that and you're seeing the mash-up concept so you have an older school that has vested in the securities as it were and they're seeing the world going to hell and it's the same people that argued about the gold standard and now you're moving to another level and so it is a post-enlightment concept took that who's the guy in the government here who wrote the book on democracy's discontents democracy's discontents the thing I want to say out of both of these another trap door in this talk I gave is that it has in it these phrases about the good and the true and of course perhaps in science at that time you could do this you could come to a law and agree on it globally and I think there was the belief in public discourse that there was such a thing as the public good and you know part of our experience has been well what about plurality how do you do this how do you do this if people really disagree about what the good is come on democracy in its discontents its author is alluding me at the moment was he was he was he was he his name is forgotten in any event you know the question is do you you know if there are plural ideas of the good do you you guys I think it's an annual worse being distracting I hope we're not up on the screening let's leave this line of thought until my brain is gone are there any more questions I'll just line it you got it I don't know I'm sorry Doc had a question at IRC that it cut off mid mid-70s I wrote to add more I can tell you the start of it and then you can maybe extrapolate about public context of self and is it possible that the expansion of the corporate private sphere in the US has crowded the public context to peripherally geographically as well as figuratively and then he goes on but that's something that cuts off midway well actually there is a whole question about you know in the 18th century there were individuals and there was the government and it's really a 19th century you begin to get this other thing called the business corporation which which has a different relationship to all these things and you know there's this famous book of albermas it's called the structural transformation of the public sphere and so in the 18th century the public sphere may be small journals being and people like Tom Payne who were able to publish a pamphlet but you know today we have a you know media conglomerates which control the discourse in a different fashion and around whom you know to simply discuss this in terms of the digital creators and the government and this is that piece of this pie entirely yes Sandel morning head of the class head of the class you know Sandel's book on democracy essentially says you know what has happened in the late 20th century was a sort of retreat to the procedural state in which what the government does is to simply act as a kind of traffic cop but not ask us to take stands not take certain key public issues and make them really issues of debate so for example the abortion debate ends up being simply a judicial decision not debated in state legislatures and Sandel's point is you got to do it you have to take these disparate ideas about the good and really work them out in public discourse so you know to the degree that the 18th century assumes that there is such a thing as the good and slowly in the 19th and 20th century we begin to get a sense that boy it's a little more complicated than that different communities have different senses of the good Sandel's point is okay but that doesn't mean that as a whole you want to give up on this ideal of trying to come to some public concord around how to lead your lives and that it's insufficient to simply reduce it to a matter of the procedures of debate you have to actually have the debate so it's it complicates what in the 18th century narrative seems like a simple quest well I think perhaps as much as I would mind sitting here for a couple more hours and hearing this discussion going we should thank Lewis and thank you all for coming for a really interesting lunch thank you