Copyright

• I was watching Fox and Friends at my gym the other morning after the debate.  For the few moments I was watching, they conducted a rather one-sided discussion about how liberals and the mainstream media had done a disservice to Joe the Plumber.  The friends were alleging that liberals were investigating Joe and invading his privacy.  The clear message was that only people such as Fox and Friends cared about the interests of Joe.  Having been in the class, I immediately thought, “there is democracy in the new media.”  Fox News is free to say what they want and people may watch if they want.
• Unrelated to Fox and Friends, I have been following the financial meltdown, and I have thought back to my last years at the FDIC when the free market advocates took over the agency.  The free marketers believed that our supervision program was detrimental to banks so they slashed the time that bank examiners could spend at a bank.  Inside the FDIC we cynically called the new program drive-by examinations.  Banks were freed to react to the market without worrying about over-zealous federal oversight.  We also watched as the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan encouraged the movement of lending from banks to mortgage affiliates.  These affiliates were not under the direct supervision of bank supervisory agencies like the FDIC and were not funded directly with bank funds.  Therefore, with little or no supervision from the Federal Reserve, these affiliates were able to loosen lending standards, sell their packaged loans through Freddie or Fannie, and  in turn be financed by “sophisticated” funding mechanisms created on the free market of Wall Street.  What a great idea!  Who needs bank examiners?  By now, I hope we all understand there can be excesses in the free market.
• This week we had the opportunity to read about the evils of copyright laws and how democratization of ideas and free markets to disseminate those ideas will create a wonderful new world.  Please refer to my first two bullet points for my opinion of how well the wonderful new democratic, market driven world has worked in the realm of news media and financial markets.  Of course, the world of knowledge creation will be entirely different according to our authors.  We know that Rupert Murdoch would never engage in a hostile takeover of Wikipedia and spin his ideas into this new knowledge base.  We know that free markets will never try to take advantage of society’s lack of sophisticated knowledge of history to create misunderstanding about our heritage.
• Copyright laws are not the entire answer to keep us safe from those who would rewrite history for their selfish purposes.  If that were true, Southern elites could have never created the myth of the “lost cause.”  But, it is important that we never forget the importance of well-researched scholarship in writing our own history.  Columbia University’s experiment with the Teacher’s College Record seems to be a creative solution to balancing scholarly recognition with wider distribution.
• As long as the discussion of copyright focuses on the tensions of creator and publisher, the important questions of how to keep the integrity of history research in a new media world will not be answered.  There is already too much information being distributed to the world.  What history scholars need to consider is how to distinguish real scholarship from a Wiki page.
• As long as the discussion is about fair use of other persons’ creativity or ideas, the more important discussion about how to recognize new research or creativity will be delayed.  The creator of Cabbage Patch dolls did not need Disney’s permission to find a new childhood phenomenon twenty years ago.  Let Disney keep Mickey Mouse. Creativity and intellectual development come from new ideas, not from transforming other person’s ideas.
• Laurence Lessig wrote about his concerns over concentration of creativity in a few corporate hands.  Concentration issues should be addressed by anti-trust laws and Federal Communication Commission standards.  Both areas have been weakened by free marketers who had unlimited access to Washington over the past few years.
• The internet has challenged us to think about how and by whom information is distributed.  It allows for a much wider range of thought, but we have become addicted to the idea that anything we find on the internet should be free.  For the most part, we get what we pay for because the vast majority of information on the internet is not worth reading.  Scholars need to find gateways that allow a wide distribution of information at a modest cost.  If it is worth reading, it is worth a few dollars to have access to it.