“[W]ith the birth of the Internet,” writes Lawrence Lessig, “[the] natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared” (19). In Free Culture, Lessig asserts that American copyright law has grown so out of control that it no longer benefits the public. He begins by establishing a clear distinction between commercial culture and “free culture”: works produced to be sold are commercial; free culture, as Lessig defines it, is everything else. “Reenacting scenes from plays or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, making tapes,” “old men […] on street corners telling stories to kids,”—all these are crucial elements of public discourse, and belong outside of commercial control (7-8). The problem with copyright, Lessig argues, is that it erodes the line between the commercial and noncommercial, turning once-free acts of sharing and retelling into copyright violations punishable by law.

In his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem, like Lessig, examines the implications of an artistic heritage increasingly restrictive and commercialized. Lethem grapples with the issue from the creator’s perspective, discussing notions of ownership and influence primarily in artistic, rather than legal, terms. There’s only one catch—Lethem’s essay is itself completely plagiarized, a patchwork of arguments and anecdotes adapted or copied wholesale from other authors. The work is a literal demonstration of its own thesis: all creative work is, in some sense, derivative, and Lessig’s “free culture” is a necessary foundation for the creation of all art. By removing created works from the commons the available raw material is diminished, and the entire culture suffers.

[As is no doubt already obvious, the structure of this essay is a bit contrived. We were asked, in the assignment on which this piece is based, to explore a “conversation” between two authors, without reference to outside sources. Can you guess what we were instructed to do with the first two paragraphs of the essay? The debate over the future of American copyright law is expansive and complicated, and it is impossible to capture all of its subtleties in an essay limited to a discussion of two writers (and perhaps more problematically, one limited to 2000 words in length). Nevertheless, Lessig and Lethem's arguments are illustrative of several of the broad themes in this debate, and if they cannot explain it completely, I hope that they will at least illuminate some of the problems with the current system.]

It is impossible to discuss copyright today without discussing the Internet; indeed, changing copyright law has always been driven by changes in publication technology. When copyright was first written into the American Constitution, there was no need for publishers to worry about noncommercial duplication: the cost of operating a printing press made necessarily made any financially threatening duplication commercial in nature. But with photographs, phonographs, video cassettes, and most recently Internet, the act of copying has become easier and easier. Computers at first seemed to promise  an alternative to litigation as a means of securing intellectual property, and recent years have seen a proliferation of draconian software mechanisms designed to make copyrighted material impossible to distribute electronically. These software locks have proven, at best, to be marginally effective, and copyright holders have returned to the law, pushing for an increasingly restrictive copyright to guarantee the continuing success of the current business model.

Such tactics are not without their casualties. Lessig gives examples of students sued for billions (51) for creating software never intended to copy files at all; Lethem cites the case of a scholar prohibited from using any Disney-related images in a scholarly piece about Mickey Mouse (65). Stories like these abound. “The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law,” Lethem writes, “is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration” (63) Both authors offer countless more examples of innocent consumers and well-meaning artists brought down in the name of intellectual property, and in the end make it clear that something is deeply wrong with the current model. But perhaps out of a fear of being deemed radical—Lethem is quick to assure his reader that he is not a Communist (65)—or even criminal—every time file sharing is discussed Lessig appears compelled to remind his readers again that “piracy is wrong” (63)—both authors acknowledge the failure of copyright but fail to fully explore its consequences. Although Lessig envisions a future in which the commercial culture swallows the free one completely, he concludes his book with a ringing endorsement of intellectual property law; Lethem, in turn, asserts that modern society cannot flourish without some notion of intellectual property.

What they ultimately advocate is instead a “thin copyright,” with a shorter term and more limited scope. Such a copyright, they argue, would give copyright holders “just enough” protection while allowing other artists “just enough” freedom to create derivative works. They speak, in extremely general terms, about some scope and duration under which all works which should “reasonably” be copyrighted are guaranteed protection and all “reasonable” public uses permitted. But as Lessig himself notes, the Internet destroys any notion of a “natural limit” on copyright law (19). Thin copyright will never be a solution, because the ideal copyright scheme that both Lethem and Lessig speculate about simply does not and cannot exist. The recent rash of litigation, if unfair, is not without cause—Lessig’s vanishing line between free and commercial culture works both ways. Because ordinary users can carry out noncommercial copying on a scale never before contemplated by the law, copyright owners must fear the individual just as much as the individual must fear the copyright owner.

This arms race between technology and copyright protection, as noted, has been a continued feature of the American copyright debate; what is new is that technology has effectively reached the point where users may make an infinite number of copies at no cost. It is relatively straightforward to count how many copies of a book have been published; considerably less so in the case of electronic documents. Our entire infrastructure relies on our ability to replicate various aspects of files elsewhere. Search engines store summaries of every website they search. Web browsers download from servers a copy of the web page being viewed; these copies remain on individual computers for weeks or even months at a time. Sending an email does not actually move it from one place to another; rather, one copy remains on the sender’s computer while another copy is sent to a mail server, which passes yet another copy to each recipient of the message: three copies, at a minimum. Thanks to modern technology, any electronic document, after being backed up, cached, reformatted, encrypted and emailed, will exist as an uncountable number of copies distributed in countless formats across countless computers, almost all without the consent or even knowledge of the author. Our technology requires this. There is no “natural limit” on the law because any limit inevitably restricts further progress.

In fact, copyright law already forbids many of the aforementioned cases. Every Google search, every website visited and every email forwarded creates copies; all computer technology relies on the fact that every day billions, perhaps tens of billions of copyright infringements go unprosecuted. Lethem writes that “Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizzare and arbitrary” (63)—we have established, with the concept of intellectual property, a legal framework completely at odds with our most important technology. We can never design a copyright for the Internet age, because is not just impractical, but impossible, to prevent the copying of digital information.

There is only one way out of this conflict. Rather than fighting against the inevitable, we should embrace it; rather than struggling endlessly to enforce it, we must abandon copyright altogether. There is no other way to preserve Lessig’s Creative Commons or guarantee Lethem his “ecstasy of influence.” Without copyright we will never risk punishing consumers for participating in the free culture. Without copyright, the impossible struggle to find a “natural limit” of the law, and all the conflict between technology and copyright, simply melt away. So copyright must go. This is the only conclusion which may be reasonably drawn from either text; the only solution, ultimately, that our technology will ever permit.

But what, then, about the rights of artists? Wouldn’t an abandonment of copyright violate their right to profit from their ideas? Both Lessig and Lethem insist that the only purpose of any intellectual property law is to ensure the continued production of creative works for the benefit of the general public. Lethem quotes the Constitution: “The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts’ ” (68). The law never had any obligations to artists. In a culture still largely taken with a Romantic image of the Author as creator of beauty and meaning out of the void, and in a society constantly bombarded with the recording industry’s stories of starving artists driven to tragic ends by acts of piracy, this is a difficult concept to comprehend. But there is no reason, intrinsically, that works should be given their current level of protection; no historical precedent that says every single person who appreciates a work should pay its author for that right. In its original conception, even copyright was never meant to protect creators.

An artist could be forgiven for feeling outrage at the suggestion that she should not be paid for her work—why would people produce anything if they could not be guaranteed compensation or even credit for it? Why should we insist that our artists starve? Such a mindset is ultimately short-sighted. Our writers and musicians need not be condemned to poverty; indeed, the fact that we insist that artists be paid by each individual consumer of their work is simply because copyright law cannot envision any other motivation to create. But such motivation clearly exists. We have seen, historically and at present, that there are other ways of convincing people to produce. A complete description of how economies outside the realm of copyright function is beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s worth considering a few examples:

Large parts of the software industry, among them Swedish database distributor MySQL and Linux provider Red Hat profit from giving their product to consumers at no charge and then selling technical support. In China, Google’s music store distributes songs for free and shares advertising revenue with record labels. Author Cory Doctorow released the full contents of his first novel online (protected, incidentally, by Lessig’s Creative Commons license) because he understood that it would drive up sales of the book in stores. It has become common for authors of free software to set up PayPal “tip jars” where appreciative users can make donations, and the jars often fill up with surprising speed. Bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, likewise, have released albums for free in their entirety and allowed listeners to pay what they deemed appropriate; in Radiohead’s case, it proved their most profitable release ever. (This, it should be noted, is hardly a new system: patrons have supported museums and opera houses for centuries on a similar model.) Artists and businessmen alike make money selling paper copies, live performances, advertising—what is evident that there are many ways of making money without depriving consumers of the freedom to enjoy works unrestricted.

Lethem gives us a name for these exchanges: “gift economies.” “Art that matters to us,” he writes, “is recieved as a gift is received” (66). Such exchanges are necessarily unequal, even when money is involved, because the value given is “uncommodifiable.” Lethem’s point is that such economies can and do coexist with commercial interactions (he gives the example of a visit to an art gallery); what he misses is that commerce need not even be visible to the consumer for gift-giving to be profitable. And in the end, a gift economy among published works might, like volunteer-only blood banks, result in creations of greater “purity and potency” (Lethem 66) than those produced by our market-driven culture.

Lessig envisions a future in which “Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and creating and cultivating culture” (9), and Lethem’s essay might be read as an artifact from such a future. Once we remove the protections of copyright, once we escape from Lethem’s “anxiety of influence,” we give license to perpetrate plagiarisms like his on a grand scale. The best pieces of our culture, recombined and reimagined: we are promised an almost inconceivable intellectual freedom, the right to use not just the works of long-dead authors but the entirety of our own culture. In Lethem’s gift economy, both production and consumption transcend commercial concerns and the free exchange of ideas is not seen as piracy but rather an act of supreme generosity. This is the promise of a culture without copyright, one in which everyone has unqualified access to the greatest works, and in which everyone, ultimately, profits.

References
[1] Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Available <http://www.free-culture.cc>.
[2] Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Harper’s Magazine February 2007: 59-71.

How can you say, “I am not defiled,
I have not gone after the Baalim”?
Look at your deeds in the Valley
Consider what you have done!
Like a lustful she-camel,
Restlessly running about [...]

Jeremiah 2:23

“Israel,” the prophet Jeremiah declares, “is a lustful she-camel.” In the company of so many complex and meaningful quotes from Pirke Avot Jeremiah’s dromedary is an admittedly unpromising way to start this graduation, but if there is one thing I have learned from Midrasha it is that wisdom manifests itself in the most unexpected places. So please bear with me for a moment.

Midrasha, too, is a lustful she-camel; like the camel, Midrasha has its ups and its downs.

And, having successfully convinced Rabbi Chester that I’m not doing anything obscene with this speech, let’s talk about lust. After all, Midrasha is nothing if it is not hormonal, and I would go so far as to argue that this is the defining characteristic of our relationship with our faith as much as it is with our peers. Yes, it is lust that keeps the women on Kesher retreats awake into the late hours of the night listening rapt as Emma Rosenthal reads the naughty bits of Cosmopolitan, and lust that causes the men of Kesher to try to join in those readings, but it is lust also that wakes us up early in the morning for services, and lust that has carried us to this stage today. The more time I have spent in this community the more I have seen that our ordinary teenage hungers pale in comparison to the spiritual hunger that brings every one of us back week after week. To look at a Kesher Havdalah service is to observe a group of students not thoughtfully committed to the practice of their religion, but caught up in a wild passion. We weep, we sigh, we moan: ours is a practice of tears and sweat and fire. There are teachers here to whose every word we cling desperately; there are lessons that keep us awake at night. We lust after Midrasha.

This graduation marks not only the end of our time at Midrasha but a fundamental change in the nature of our religious observance. The Hillels we’re going to be spending time in next year will not give us the same freedom or diversity of experience that we’ve so been privileged to have these past five years, and at some point in the future we’ll have to settle down and find another congregation of our own. But my hope at this graduation is that we never lose completely that lust that has held us captive to this place and these people since the eighth grade; that our Judaism is always passionate, always a little wild, that even as we go on our way, each and every one of us remains, at least a little bit, a lustful camel.

There is a number that is carved into the stone of memorials, sealed in black lettering in history books and burned into the memories of Jews worldwide. It is a number that has come to symbolize the devastation brought about by the Holocaust, a favorite target both of its deniers [1] and those most committed to preserving the memory of the Shoah [2]. It is a number that represents a tragedy of inconceivable scope and unimaginable horror.

In the early years of Hebrew school, when asked “How many Jews died during the Holocaust?”, I could quickly and easily provided the answer of six million. If the question were phrased slightly differently, and I were asked instead “How many people died during the Holocaust?” I would have given a similar answer, tentatively (with the detachment a number too large to imagine allows) a couple million more. It would be an answer given without the same certainty, an answer nobody taught me. My answer was to the wrong question, and the number I learned, in both Jewish classrooms and secular ones, was far too small.

Great, then, was my horror to learn that the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust, that Mennonites like those in my father’s family had been persecuted just as were mother’s Jewish family, and that there were more, millions and millions more, than I had ever known. I was shocked to learn that ordinary German, Polish and Russian people had died alongside Jews in the concentration camps; shocked to learn that Josef Mengele, whom I associate even more than Hitler with the inhumanity of the Holocaust, saved the most ghastly of his experiments for Romani children [3].

I can write at great length and with great passion about the horrors of the Holocaust; I can summon, with all the words I possess to describe destruction and hopelessness, the images of prisoners forced to dig their own graves and of human ashes falling like snow over the camps; but as long as I remember a Holocaust of six million, those gas chambers and graves are occupied only by my people, and all of my writing is dishonest.

Throughout my life there has always been an Israel – I have only ever seen a Jewish people with a vital population; rebounded, victorious, but I understand now how precious and extraordinary this fact is. I understand how lucky I am that the Jews are still here to speak up.

As a Jew I have an obligation to tell the full story. My generation is the last that will ever know survivors, and we are bound to keep the Holocaust’s memory alive and speak for its dead. If we are the ones to make sure that the remembrance, history and lessons of the Holocaust be passed to a new generation, then we must ensure that the remembrance we pass on is the whole truth. We must remember and speak for all the dead. To forget, or worse ignore the others is ultimately to dishonor the memory of our own; it is to diminish in scale the atrocity we have sworn to make the world remember forever.

This is the truth: as many as five hundred thousand Romanies, nearly half the population, died at the hands of the Nazis [4]. 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war, over half of those interned, were murdered by the third Reich [5], as were numerous German political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons and 1.9 million Poles [6]. The gas chamber, before its widespread adoption in death camps, was used to exterminate some two hundred fifty thousand disabled members of the German community, among them five thousand children [7]. And in addition to all these, never forgotten, are the six million Jews.

There are groups that object to the use of the term “Holocaust” to refer to anything but the slaughter of those Jews during the Second World War [8], but this is a terrible mistake. That name represents all the atrocities of the war, and to deny the other eleven and a half million as part of the Holocaust is to participate in a similar kind of revisionist history as those who deny its existence. It is to refuse to count nearly two thirds of the dead on the same kind of technicality with which they discount our six million.

Numbering all seventeen and a half million, though, is more important even than simply maintaining the honesty of the historical record. If we do not count all the dead, then we have missed entirely the lesson of the Holocaust, and have diluted the promise of “never again.” We owe it to the memory of the victims to teach the full history to everyone. What is desperately needed, in the community at large but especially within the Jewish community, is to remember a Holocaust of fully seventeen and a half million.

But to give full recognition to the victims we must take an even broader view, and understand the parallels to our own time. Otherwise we continue to see the Holocaust as something that happened to our white-skinned, brown-haired ancestors and so miss the Holocaust that was Rwanda and the Holocaust that is Darfur. Genocide is still happening, and the world’s failure to act in Cambodia and in Africa stems in part from a vision of the past horror that is too narrow, and does not allow us to see those others’ death and ours as the same. My generation must understand, rather, that Armenia and Poland and Cambodia and Rwanda and Darfur are equally hideous blots on the record of history. We must be made aware of the fact that we have failed in our sworn task, that it is happening again and this time we, too, are turning a blind eye and again refusing to count these dead among the victims of genocide. And if we do not acknowledge them, then we can never do anything to help them. Any effort to fight genocide must begin with a complete understanding of those past, and we must begin by understanding each and every one of the Holcaust’s victims.

References:

1. Harwood, Richard. Did Six Million Really Die? Toronto: Samisdat, 1977.
2. Aboulker, Fanny. “Six Million.” 2008. 23 Apr. 2008 <http://www.sixmillion.org>.
3. Bülow, Louis. “Josef Mengele, Angel of Death.” The Holocaust: Crimes, Heroes and Villains. 2008. 23 Apr. 2008 <http://www.auschwitz.dk/Mengele.htm>.
4. In Re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation. No. 105 F.Supp.2d 139 (E.D.N.Y. 2000). United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. 26 July 2000. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/rulings/cv/1996/685455.pdf>.
5. “Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2008. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007178>.
6. “Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2008. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007178>.
7. Ryan, Donna F. and John S. Schuchman. Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002.
8. “The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion.” 2003. Yad Vashem. 23 Apr. 2008 <http://yad-vashem.org.il/Odot/prog/index_before_change_table.asp?gate=0-2>.

Although I am not pressing for a neurophysiological approach to AI, I am unlike many AI people in that I believe that any AI model eventually has to converge to brainlike hardware, or at least to an architecture that at some level of abstraction is “isomorphic” to brain architecture (also at some level of abstraction).

Coincidentally, this month’s WIRED had an interview with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and philosopher-cum-cognitive-scientist (or is it the other way around?) Daniel Dennett that addressed similar topics. They take a slightly more hardware-oriented approach, “semi-autonomous [...] independently evolved agencies” to Hofstader’s symbols, but ultimately come to the same conclusion; namely, when we develop an artificial intelligence it will be one that mirrors the functioning of the human brain on a lower level than currently expected. Asked “What would a machine that worked this way look like?”, Dennet replies: “Like us”.

I used to dream of growing up to be The Man who Created AI. I’ve pretty much given up on that now – it may be that growing up in this age I’ve lost all sense of perspective, but I won’t be at all surprised if someone has built a thinking machine as described by Hofstadter et al. by the time I graduate from University. Minsky himself says, “If I could afford to get three or four first-rate systems programmers, we could do it.” I’m starting to think, though, that a human-style AI is just the entry point into something much broader.

Creating a piece of machinery that can accurately model a human mind on any level will be a revolutionary achievement, but it will only confirm what we already suspect about how the human mind functions. We will have learned a great deal, both about computers and about our own minds, but in the end we’re left with the same kind of computer currently manufactured with some old-fashioned lovemaking and a good grade school education.

Where the fun really begins, in my opinion, is when we start creating non-human intelligences. Programs that navigate conceptual spaces entirely alien to us. Minds incapable of making mistakes, or forming half-complete thoughts. Minds that think purely in numbers. Even (dare I say it?) the top-down AI that seems to be the butt end of so much criticism now.

This is hinted at in the postscript to “Boolean Dream”:

What bothers me is a kind of “hardware chauvinism” that we humans evince. This chauvinism says “Real Things live in three dimensions; they are made of atoms. Photons bounce off of Real Things [and so on...] The idea that being able to maneuver about in a “space” or “universe” of pure abstractions might entitle a robot to be called “sentient” would be ridiculed to the skies, no matter if the maneuvering in that abstruse high-dimensional space were as supple and graceful as that of the most skilled Olympic ice-skating champion or the greatest jazz pianist.

But Hofstadter is himself guilty of a kind of “software chauvinism” by assuming that even his robot will have to be built from a bottom-up, symbol-based intelligence. He gives excellent reasons why a human-type AI would need to be constructed this way, but doesn’t linger on the incredibly compelling idea of building intelligence that perceives the world in a way completely different from the way we experience ours.

If any one of these “alternative intelligences” were left on the doorstep of an AI lab at MIT tomorrow, I would be surprised if most people would immediately leap to call it intelligent. After all, it’s unlikely that all or even most of the AIs described above could pass the Turing test. But it’s important to remember that, in spite of all objections to the contrary, the Turing test is, by construction, anthropocentric – at the end of the day, it’s a measure of humanness rather than intelligence. I suspect that once we’ve developed the AI that everyone’s waiting for (and that will be a significant achievement) we’re going to discover just how much more territory there is to explore.

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