What's wrong with standing up for some things to be public?
Michael Madison, citing the recent NYTimes story about some libraries choosing the Open Content Alliance over Google, the WSJ story about Microsoft and Hollywood coming to terms on copyright "precrimes," and Tim Wu's Slate piece cited below, has some harsh words for those of us trying to make arguments in public about matters of public access and public goods:
... What do these stories and developments have in common? As lawyers and even more so, as content “creators,” “users,” “archivists,” and “researchers,” we believe that we are given a world in which the Law (note the capital L) says X and any failure to comply with the Law is “illegal.” From a “progressive” or “liberal” standpoint, we believe that private companies are presumptively bad and Big private companies are presumptively evil, and combinations of Big private companies are almost too scary to imagine. “Not-for-profit” organizations are good, universities are better, and libraries and librarians are happy warriors for the public interest.
In the examples above, therefore, (first) Google and Microsoft are scanning millions of books as part of a secret plot to control our brains; (second) Microsoft and Disney are sending a sinister symbolic message about User-Generated Content; and (third) the fansite community has internalized the evildoers’ message. The Law might change all of this, but Real Change is blocked by the political power wielded by Big private companies.
My lightning quick summary is rhetorically overdone, but I think that it captures an important part of the copyright / information / knowledge “debate” of recent years.
And I think that once the more overheated rhetoric is pulled aside, none of these three propositions really survives. The Law isn’t necessarily X. Private companies are not all bad; Big private companies are not all evil; not-for-profit organizations and universities and even librarians have deeply mixed motives. Consumers and users and researchers need not internalize the rhetoric of tolerated lawbreaking, but their only alternative is not resistance on the path to revolution, blocked by the Powers That Be.
Do we need a new vocabulary and a new syntax to describe this landscape? I think so. What would those look and sound like? More (I hope) shortly.
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Here is my response:
Huh? Come on. Nobody this side of Naomi Klein says all corporations are bad.
Again, I don't see your accurate complication of the limits that librarians must work with as "mixed motives."
I am guilty of idealizing librarians. But that's pretty damn easy to do. I also idealize fire fighters, police officers, public school teachers, and soldiers. The point of invoking such idealizations in a policy argument is to appeal to core principles. If we have to choose a custodian to manage OUR information, should it be an institution that has a core principles that reflect republican civic virtue? Or should we entrust our collective riches to one with core principles that include massive consumer profiling and extensive trade secrets in the service of quarterly returns to investors?
I would make an argument for the Army and against Blackwater based on the same framework. Wouldn't you? Or would criticisms of Blackwater land me in some boat with Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky?
It's about how WE allocate OUR resources. It's not about corporations being bad. It's about a particular corporation and its specific attributes, actions, policies, and relationship with essential issues like privacy.
Please don't flatten out complicated debates (not in quotes) by jacking a few quotes out of newspaper and Web site articles. You know this is not that simple.
As for my own motives, if there is an unjustified amount of idealization worth deflating, it's certainly attached to Google. Just take a look at how our copyright allies declare it to be the Great Savior of fair use and open access.
The problem is not one of vocabulary here. We are dealing with a 25-year degradation of everything public. I am proud and justified to defend things public when appropriate.
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