As a veteran of many copyright campaigns over the years, I welcome William Patry's exposé on rhetoric as a weapon of war. I'm speaking rhetorically, of course.
In Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, Patry – he's senior copyright counsel at Google, a former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, a policy planning adviser to the Register of Copyrights and a law professor, so he has the credentials – analyzes the use of language in the copyright debates, demonstrating convincingly, in engaging and vigorous prose, that how we talk about copyright often clouds the very issues that we are attempting to clarify, impeding the reasoned arguments we need to arrive at good policy.
Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, by William Patry, Oxford University Press, 251 pages, $29.95
Chief among his targets are such metaphorical terms as “piracy,” conjuring up images of banditry on the high seas, and “property,” invoking an individual's right to absolute dominion over his own. The word “war” itself, Patry points out, is a metaphor importing into the copyright debates a moral imperative to fight the enemy, creating a misleading discourse about economic issues, using the language of war.
Patry takes us through a multiplicity of disciplines to make his case against language abuse. Ranging from Aristotle and Leviticus to Lord Macaulay and Mark Twain, with a stop to describe the “Golden Age of Piracy” in the early 18th century, he brings a diverting eclecticism to his argument. In the process, he takes on various “mythic origins” of copyright. We learn, for example, that the powerful “creation-as-birth” metaphor – the idea of authors as “parent” to their art – is ancient. It was employed by Plato to describe Homer and Hesiod's relationship to their works, and later by Cervantes, Milton, James Joyce and Daniel Defoe to describe their own.
And the “agrarian metaphor” from Leviticus – that is, the right to “reap what you have sown” – was first used in regard to intellectual property at least 588 years ago, in 1421, in the case of a design by Brunelleschi for a boat to carry stone on the Arno River in Florence.
The key point, Patry asserts, is that the debate over copyright is essentially an economic debate over business models, and not over moral principles
Patry's goal through this entertaining history of metaphors is to show their serious shortcomings as a basis for reasoning about copyright. Repeated with numbing regularity over the past 300 years, they are so loaded with prejudicial emotional associations that they impair our ability to think. Far from being merely a poetic device, metaphor comes to frame and define our thinking, playing a key role in understanding itself. Patry cites cognitive linguists who say that metaphors are in fact essential to thought, so that, since we cannot rid ourselves of them, “we must pay constant attention to how metaphors are used to ensure that the associations made are apt and helpful.” Patry's point is that the metaphors in the copyright wars are anything but.
The metaphors mask a new-market, old-market clash in which an unproven new market is pitched against an existing profitable one. The copyright industries resist innovation in the Internet age because it means “cannibalizing their core business.” In defence of their outdated business models, they insist on control and refuse to give consumers what they want. They use rhetorical devices in a deliberate attempt to create a “moral panic,” a sense of imminent existential threat to society's values and interests, a manoeuvre Patry calls “an opportunistic political tactic by which undeserving economic interests are advanced under the guise of false moral imperatives.”
He cites the motion picture industry's fight against the VCR in the 1980s and, more recently, the lobbying for DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as examples.
