Lewis Hyde: remaking copyright by recovering the past

Lewis Hyde is one of the great, and almost entirely unknown, U.S. geniuses. According to this past week’s New York Times Magazine, “David Foster Wallace called him ‘one of our true superstars of nonfiction.’ Hyde’s fans - among them Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem - routinely use words like ‘transformative’ and ‘life-altering’ to describe his books, which they’ve been known to pass hand to hand like spiritual texts or samizdat manifestoes. The source of much of this reverence is Hyde’s first book, The Gift (1983), which has never been out of print (it was recently rereleased by Vintage in a 25th-anniversary edition) and which tries to reconcile the value of doing creative work with the exigencies of a market economy.”

According to the Times, Hyde’s attention these days has turned to the ways computers and the internet have affected our views of creation and property. As I’ve written before, intellectual property may be property, but we make a huge mistake when we assume it is property just like land or couches are property. The ease with which we now can copy and instantly and disseminate intellectual property world-wide has, however, entirely upset existing intellectual property law. We should not be shocked by the legal chaos — when the material underpinnings on which law has been made change, the law is likely no longer going to work very well. When that upheaval occurs in a political climate that worships capitalism, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that, as Hyde puts it, “the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate ‘land grab’ of information - often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists - that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways.”

One particular example of what upsets Hyde is the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which is commonly understood to be the result of Disney’s capacity to economically coerce legislation to protect its monopoly over Mickey Mouse. The point of copyright law is to encourage invention for the public good. As the Supreme Court has stated, “[t]he monopoly created by copyright thus rewards the individual author in order to benefit the public.” There is no reason to believe Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck would not have been invented and that Walt Disney would not have been fairly compensated for their invention without the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act’s posthumous extension of the Disney Corporation’s control over the images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Such laws provoke Hyde to write:

Always in the background lies the question of the commercialization of culture, exemplified at the moment by many things–the ‘enclosure’ of the public domain, the patenting of aboriginal medicines, proprietary control of genetic materials or of the internet, and the general market triumphalism that has followed the end of the Cold War.

According to Hyde, we can begin to achieve the intended purposes of intellectual property — to promote invention, not maximize the wealth of the inventors — if, as the Times writes, we recover

the idea of the cultural commons as a deeply American concept. To that end, [Hyde] excavates a history of the American imagination in which the emphasis is not on the lone genius (Thoreau scribbling hermetically in the Massachusetts woods) but on the anonymous pamphleteer, the inventor eager to share his discoveries. In an essay that offers a preview of his book (posted, fittingly, on his Web site), Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. “The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms,” he writes, “is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every ‘town should have … a primitive forest …, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,’ the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance ‘exclusive right’ with ‘limited times.’ It is a tradition worth recovering.”

If you can’t say it clearly, you aren’t thinking it clearly.

At Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum makes a crucial point in criticizing Sarah Palin’s inchoherence:

I think being so utterly unable to explain what one wants to say is truly and reasonably regarded as a defect in one’s qualifications for office - partly because being so inept at talking in a controlled and sensible way strongly suggests that there was no sensible thought back there, and partly because even if there were sensible thoughts back there somewhere, a leader needs to be more skilled at articulating them.

I suppose I’d qualify Mr. Pullum’s statement in one way — where there’s incoherence, there rarely are sensible thoughts, even allowing for the ungrammatical nature of a lot of spoken language,

In short, if you cannot write or speak your thoughts coherently, you don’t have coherent thoughts. Think about it. How often have you heard a lecture, thought how much brilliance was there, and then gone home to write down notes embodying that brilliance, only to find out that there are gaps and fallacies filling spaces that must be filled if the brilliance is to persist?

If you can’t say it, you don’t know it. On this point, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has been widely misinterpreted (and was perhaps intended) as a brief in favor of gut feeling over analysis. I think, given the compelling examples he writes about, that Gladwell’s thesis would better be stated as follows: the gut feelings of people well trained and experienced in a field are often better than analysis. There is a huge difference between the gut feelings of hockey moms untrained in tax or foreign policy and hockey moms trained in tax and foreign policy when it comes to opining on tax and foreign policy. Richard Posner’s review of Blink explains (emphasis and hyperlink added) my point well:

As Exhibit A for the superiority of intuitive to articulate thinking, Gladwell offers the case of a purported ancient Greek statue that was offered to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Months of careful study by a geologist (to determine the age of the statue) and by the museum’s lawyers (to trace the statue’s provenance) convinced the museum that it was genuine. But when historians of ancient art looked at it, they experienced an “intuitive revulsion,” and indeed it was eventually proved to be a fake.

The example is actually a bad one for Gladwell’s point, though it is a good illustration of the weakness of this book, which is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, rich in “human interest” particulars but poor in analysis. . . .

But back to the case of the Greek statue. It illustrates not the difference between intuitive thinking and articulate thinking, but different articulate methods of determining the authenticity of a work of art. One method is to trace the chain of title, ideally back to the artist himself (impossible in this case); another is to perform chemical tests on the material of the work; and a third is to compare the appearance of the work to that of works of art known to be authentic. The fact that the first two methods happened to take longer in the particular case of the Getty statue is happenstance. Had the seller produced a bill of sale from Phidias to Cleopatra, or the chemist noticed that the statue was made out of plastic rather than marble, the fake would have been detected in the blink of an eye. Conversely, had the statue looked more like authentic statues of its type, the art historians might have had to conduct a painstakingly detailed comparison of each feature of the work with the corresponding features of authentic works. Thus the speed with which the historians spotted this particular fake is irrelevant to Gladwell’s thesis. Practice may not make perfect, but it enables an experienced person to arrive at conclusions more quickly than a neophyte. The expert’s snap judgment is the result of a deliberative process made unconscious through habituation.

Question authority, and then question those questioning authority

It may seem off topic to engage in a prediction regarding a sports event, but let it be heard here first — this weekend Michigan will beat Ohio State in football. In fact, you are likely to hear it nowhere else. Michigan is suffering its worst football season in history. Ohio sports writers are writing things like “Michigan (3-8) couldn’t be a bigger underdog if it were coming off a loss to St. Ignatius [an Ohio high school football power] at home instead of a loss to Northwestern.”

But my point is this: lawyers beat adversaries who never question the assumptions and premises most people never question. Lawyers need to make decisions. That’s a topic for another day. And one could question premises and assumptions forever without ever coming to a decision, so I’m not suggesting that one engage in perpetual questioning, that one ape Hamlet.

Rather, I am suggesting that the common wisdom is far more common than it is wise and that no lawyer ever got far for long by going with his unexamined gut instincts. And it almost seems a law of sports that when one team is considered unbeatable it will lose.

In the political arena, Tom Tomorrow has it right on.

Oh yeah: GO BLUE!

p.s. A friend at the ABA Journal is asking lawyers to complete the Journal’s survey on how you think the recession will affect the legal profession. You can do so here. All I know is that if Congress doesn’t help out the auto industry there are an awful lot of people in Michigan and Ohio who will lose their jobs and/or never get paid for goods and services they have already provided. I suppose, though, that bankruptcy lawyers will make out well.

McElhaney on being a good writer and speaker: let the story pick the words. Glass: and then explain the point.

How do you do what I’ve been writing about — making your thinking clear by avoiding empty phrases that don’t address the really dire questions you face?  My former Case Western Reserve colleague Jim McElhaney, who’s literally written the book on Trial Practice, has excellent advice in a column entitled “Stop Sounding Like a Lawyer“: “The first step in becoming a good writer and speaker is to concentrate on the story. Let the story-not the legal theory-pick the words.”

McElhaney does a good job in the article of telling a story and conveying its significance.  Ira Glass (a college classmate –  I have crossed paths throughout my life with remarkably talented and accomplished people without many of those traits rubbing off on me) explains that both a compelling story and reflection upon the story’s significance are necessary to capture an audience’s attention:

Surely you’re joking. I can tell by that ridiculous price.

On Friday I mentioned the case of a radio contest winner who successfully sued the radio station for the value of a Renaul Clio after she’d won a contest offering the car to the contest’s winner.  When she’d shown up to the station to claim her prize, the station had given her a tiny model of a Renault instead of an actual car.  This type of case turns on whether a reasonable person would believe the offer is a serious one.  Radio stations do offer cars as prizes.  In contrast, check out the following:

After seeing the ad, John Leonard, then a 21-year-old business student, discovered he could purchase individual Pepsi points from the company for 10¢ each.  After sending Pepsi $700,008.50 — representing money he had raised from five investors for 6,999,985 Pepsi Points, fifteen of his own Pepsi Points, and a little extra for “shipping and handling” — Leonard demanded his jet. Pepsi laughed off the claim, pointing out the Harrier had never been offered in the Pepsi Points catalogue and was just in the commercial to provide a humorous completion to the piece.

As indicated by Snopes.com, “If we have to put disclaimers on spots that are obviously farces, where does it end?” Pepsi spokesman Jon Harris said. Well, it didn’t end there. Leonard filed suit in Miami against Pepsi for breach of contract, fraud, deceptive and unfair trade practices, and misleading advertising.

Leonard lost.  In the opinion dismissing Leonard’s lawsuit, Judge Kimba Wood (speaking from personal experience, an excellent judge, though not immune from notoriety), did what lawyers often have to do — spell out in painstaking detail what most people accept as gut feelings.  In this case, she had to spell out that a reasonable person viewing the commercial would know that Pepsi was joking about the Harrier Jet:

Plaintiff’s understanding of the commercial as an offer must also be rejected because the Court finds that no objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier Jet. . . .

In evaluating the commercial, the Court must not consider defendant’s subjective intent in making the commercial, or plaintiff’s subjective view of what the commercial offered, but what an objective, reasonable person would have understood the commercial to convey. . . .

If it is clear that an offer was not serious, then no offer has been made . . .  An obvious joke, of course, would not give rise to a contract. . . . On the other hand, if there is no indication that the offer is “evidently in jest,” and that an objective, reasonable person would find that the offer was serious, then there may be a valid offer.

Plaintiff’s insistence that the commercial appears to be a serious offer requires the Court to explain why the commercial is funny. Explaining why a joke is funny is a daunting task; as the essayist E.B. White has remarked, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process….” The commercial is the embodiment of what defendant appropriately characterizes as “zany humor.”

First, the commercial suggests, as commercials often do, that use of the advertised product will transform what, for most youth, can be a fairly routine and ordinary experience. The military tattoo and stirring martial music, as well as the use of subtitles in a Courier font that scroll terse messages across the screen, such as “MONDAY 7:58 AM,” evoke military and espionage thrillers. The implication of the commercial is that Pepsi Stuff merchandise will inject drama and moment into hitherto unexceptional lives. The commercial in this case thus makes the exaggerated claims similar to those of many television advertisements: that by consuming the featured clothing, car, beer, or potato chips, one will become attractive, stylish, desirable, and admired by all. A reasonable viewer would understand such advertisements as mere puffery, not as statements of fact, see, e.g., Hubbard v. General Motors Corp., 95 Civ. 4362(AGS), 1996 WL 274018, at *6 (S.D.N.Y. May 22, 1996) (advertisement describing automobile as “Like a Rock,” was mere puffery, not a warranty of quality), . . . and refrain from interpreting the promises of the commercial as being literally true.

Second, the callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prize aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. Rather than checking the fuel gauges on his aircraft, the teenager spends his precious preflight minutes preening. The youth’s concern for his coiffure appears to extend to his flying without a helmet. Finally, the teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school “sure beats the bus” evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area, as opposed to taking public transportation.

Third, the notion of traveling to school in a Harrier Jet is an exaggerated adolescent fantasy. In this commercial, the fantasy is underscored by how the teenager’s schoolmates gape in admiration, ignoring their physics lesson. The force of the wind generated by the Harrier Jet blows off one teacher’s clothes, literally defrocking an authority figure. As if to emphasize the fantastic quality of having a Harrier Jet arrive at school, the Jet lands next to a plebeian bike rack. This fantasy is, of course, extremely unrealistic. No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause.

Fourth, the primary mission of a Harrier Jet, according to the United States Marine Corps, is to “attack and destroy surface targets under day and night visual conditions.” . . . Manufactured by McDonnell Douglas, the Harrier Jet played a significant role in the air offensive of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. . . . The jet is designed to carry a considerable armament load, including Sidewinder and Maverick missiles. See id. As one news report has noted, “Fully loaded, the Harrier can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee–albeit a roaring 14- ton butterfly and a bee with 9,200 pounds of bombs and missiles.” . . . In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired “in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.”

Fifth, the number of Pepsi Points the commercial mentions as required to “purchase” the jet is 7,000,000. To amass that number of points, one would have to drink 7,000,000 Pepsis (or roughly 190 Pepsis a day for the next hundred years–an unlikely possibility), or one would have to purchase approximately $700,000 worth of Pepsi Points. The cost of a Harrier Jet is roughly $23 million dollars, a fact of which plaintiff was aware when he set out to gather the amount he believed necessary to accept the alleged offer. . . . Even if an objective, reasonable person were not aware of this fact, he would conclude that purchasing a fighter plane for $700,000 is a deal too good to be true.

Plaintiff argues that a reasonable, objective person would have understood the commercial to make a serious offer of a Harrier Jet because there was “absolutely no distinction in the manner” in which the items in the commercial were presented. Plaintiff also relies upon a press release highlighting the promotional campaign, issued by defendant, in which “[n]o mention is made by [defendant] of humor, or anything of the sort.” These arguments suggest merely that the humor of the promotional campaign was tongue in cheek. Humor is not limited to what Justice Cardozo called “[t]he rough and boisterous joke … [that] evokes its own guffaws.” Murphy v. Steeplechase Amusement Co., 250 N.Y. 479, 483, 166 N.E. 173, 174 (1929). In light of the obvious absurdity of the commercial, the Court rejects plaintiff’s argument that the commercial was not clearly in jest.

Leonard v. Pepsico has become a favorite of Contracts professors.  There are several good reasons why.  First, it plainly states the applicable rule: an offer is an offer if a reasonable person would take it as an offer, regardless of what the person making the offer subjectively intends.  Second, of course, it allows us to use in-class video, which makes us feel as if we’re somehow staying in touch with our students’ desires.  Third, Judge Wood does a good job at the skill that is so central to good lawyering — articulating feelings that most people are satisfied at merely feeling, not explaining.  In this case, the feeling is the feeling of humor (that Pepsi was just joking), but more often judges are required to explain why something is “just” when most non-lawyers would be satisfied with merely asserting “I just think it’s fair” or “I just think it’s not fair.”

Good lawyers, in short, begin their work where most people end their thinking.  Good lawyers take what people “feel” and make explicity and clear the reasons for those feelings.

Leonard v. Pepsico is an excellent case to illustrate one more very important principal.  What people intend is often embodied in and expressed by the price they are offering.  No one could take seriously an offer to buy a Harrier Jet for $700,000.  In fact, I might say (and often do to my Contracts students) that nothing is as expressive as price.

Friday Night Music Break: Was (Not Was): Hello Dad, I’m in Jail

Friday Night Music Break: Laurie Anderson: Only an Expert

Top 10 of the World’s Weirdest Compensation Claims

I haven’t fact-checked this post, so I would take it with a grain or entire shaker of salt, but it’s amusing to read the Top 10 or the World’s Weirdest Compensation Claims.  As a Contracts professor, I am particularly amused by the following two (numbers 4 and 1 on the list):

In 2005 a Romanian prisoner, Pavel M., while serving 20 years for murder, sued God. He argued that his baptism was an agreement between him and God under which, in exchange for value such as prayer, God would keep him out of trouble.

Cathy McGowan, 26 of Derby, England, was overjoyed when a DJ told her that she had correctly answered a quiz question and had won the competition prize: a Renault Clio. However, when she arrived at the radio station to pick up her prize she was presented with a 4-inch model of the car. In 2001, she sued and a judge at Derby County Court ruled that the Radio Station and its owners to pay £8,000 for the real vehicle.

I would, incidentally, expect my current Contracts students to be able to answer on their exam why it would be that Ms. McGowan should have received the value of the real vehicle.  For that matter, they should be able to explain why Pavel M.’s breach of contract claim would be dismissed as well, though that argument might fall within the scope of Civil Procedure: my guess is that there is no governmental court in the United States that has subject matter jurisdiction over claims against God.  Personal jurisdiction, on the other hand, wouldn’t be a problem, assuming God is everywhere.  Putting aside the jurisdictional issues, it is difficult for me to opine on the merits of Pavel M.’s contract claim since I don’t have the terms of the agreement he reached with God.

On a not altogether incidental but less frivolous note, I should point out that frivolous claims (which Ms. McGowan’s plainly wasn’t) really aren’t the problem many people claim them to be.

Barack Obama, law professor

A former student’s account of the President-Elect as a law professor.

Richard Epstein is considered one of the most brilliant people in legal academia, but I genuinely hope my Contracts students don’t feel at the end of the year the way this student felt about Epstein’s Contracts class:

You don’t actually learn the law in law school, at least not at a school like Chicago. Law school is for training you to think through arguments like a lawyer would, and to give you a lay of the land in various fundamental legal areas. Put another way: after spending two quarters studying Contracts with Richard Epstein, I had no idea how to actually draft a contract.

What, indeed, is fair use?

My students sometimes wonder whether their failures to find clarity in the law are the result of a lack of intelligence.  They aren’t.  Let me give a very timely example.  The New York Press writes that Girl Talk’s music — aural collages of others’ recordings — exists “without fear of lawsuit, thanks to the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law.”  The RIAA, on the other hand, states that “generally speaking, the use of any part of a song requires a license.”

The RIAA’s position is not without basis.  Judge Kevin Duffy in Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991)(Duffy, J.), in a decision that did not even consider issues pertaining to fair use, enjoined the distribution of Biz Markie’s third album because one of its songs sampled three words and the accompaniment ostinato of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s schlock hit “Alone Again, Naturally.” Duffy wasn’t satisfied with a mere injunction, however: he referred the defendants to the U.S. Attorney’s office for criminal prosecution and wrote in his opinion, like a preacher from the pulpit,”‘Thou shalt not steal.’ [Exodus, Chapter 20, Verse 15] has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is not always followed.”

Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2004), compounded this folly, holding that the defendant had committed copyright infringement by using in his own musical recording a two-second sample from an earlier copyrighted recording, lowering the pitch, and looping the sample to extend it to 16 beats. Again, the court failed entirely to consider the First Amendment rights that must be balanced against maintaining the composer’s incentive to create, the very core of the fair use doctrine.

The Biz Markie case, Grand Upright Music, is generally considered the reason industry practice (as reflected in the RIAA’s statement quoted above) is to pay for any and all recorded samples. Record companies certainly have no interest in challenging the existing regime. The recordings they own are held inviolate too, so why challenge the right of another recording company to require payment for any sample, no matter how small, no matter transformative its use is, and no matter how little impact it will have on the market for the sampled piece?

Plainly, then, the New York Press is engaging in wishful thinking in assuming Girl Talk can operate “without fear” of lawsuits because of the fair use doctrine.  But MTV.com is being just as innacurate when it writes that Girl Talk’s failure to get permission to use the copyrighted recordings it uses “means that they appear in [Girl Talk's] song[s] illegally.”  And Techdirt is right on the money when it writes:

[W]ith over 300 samples used on the album, there’s almost certainly going to be a few who get upset [by the Girl Talk album]. . . . [T]he woman in charge of the copyright for the band the Guess Who is planning to go after Girl Talk, noting that: “We’ll chase it down. What more can you do?” Well, actually, there’s plenty more that you can do — such as recognizing that no one who hears the music on Girl Talk is going to see that as a replacement to the Guess Who’s album — and, if anything, it might entice new fans to the original.

So does Girl Talk exist without the fear of lawsuits?  Of course not.  But, as I wrote recently, if were advising a client whose recordings Girl Talk had sampled, I would advise that client not to sue Girl Talk: it’s position to argue that it has transformed the copyrighted materials and thus that their use is non-inringing fair use is just too good.  I’d go after someone I am more likely to beat.  Othewise, I’d lose all the leverage I have with the existence, as yet undisputed in case law, of the decisions in Grand Upright Music and Bridgeport Music.

The law may not be clear, but what I advise a client can nonetheless be clear.  Grasping that paradox is central to what it takes to being to really learn to think like a lawyer.