Category: Information

Walt Whitman Championed Democracy and Fought for Copyright – Part II

(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series)

“This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.” — Walt Whitman, 1891—

Upon passage of the international copyright law just about a year before his death, Walt Whitman’s comment (quoted in Part I) included this refrain of the Golden Rule, about which scholar Martin Buinicki, in his 2003 paper writes the following: “The somewhat grumpy pragmatism evident in Whitman’s ‘do unto others’ defense of his views is offset by the revelation that the international copyright law was more than a business matter for Whitman; it was ‘a question of honesty—of morals—of a literature, in fact.’” 

Despite America’s eventual leadership as a mass producer and exporter of creative works by the mid-20th century, the U.S. was remarkably slow to adopt international copyright agreements in contrast to European and other major trading partners.  Walt Whitman’s career coincided almost exactly with the roughly fifty-year interval between early debate on international copyright and ultimate ratification of the law; and in the same spirit in which Whitman answered Emerson’s call for a new—and intrinsically American—voice, he devoted that voice to the cause of copyright as in one editorial, written in 1846 for the Brooklyn Evening Star, which states…

“The writers of America are more miserably paid than their class are in any other part of the world.  And this will continue to be the case so long as we have no international copyright.  At this time there is hardly any encouragement at all for the literary profession in the way of book-writing.  Most of our authors are frittering away their brains for an occasional five dollar bill from the magazine publishers.”

For roughly a half century, while America’s trading partners adopted various international copyright agreements, the U.S. Congress remained persuaded by the independent publishers—this included printers, typefounders, bookbinders, et al—who argued that adoption of international copyright would result in large, eastern firms gaining monopoly control by virtue of their being the only entities with the resources and relationships necessary to obtain licenses for foreign manuscripts.

Thus, Buinicki sees as relevant Whitman’s dual role as both author and “defender of the artisan class.”  “Just as [Whitman] felt that American democracy could foster native authors even as it provided fair treatment for foreign authors, his publishing practices collapsed the kind of printer-author-publisher oppositions that remained at the center of the monopoly dispute,” writes Buinicki.  This refers to the fact that, as a staunch advocate of international copyright, Whitman also remained close to the independent printing industry, in which he had apprenticed years before becoming the author and poet we know today.

When he self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman employed a small, independent firm and even helped set type for the first edition.  DIY in both spirit and practice long before that acronym existed, the views of America’s preeminent, democratic poet would offer little support to today’s digital-age pundits, who like to contrast—rather than correlate—the interests of independent artists with the purpose of copyright.

As Buinicki observes in his paper, Whitman’s advocacy of copyright was much broader than his own—or any other author’s—proximate financial needs; it envisioned a mature and holistic culture in which America should not merely strive for a place among the global anthology of creative works, but would be uniquely poised to lead in the production of culture.  He was one of many authors and artists (and not all of these were American), who believed instinctively that the brash, American experiment in republicanism—codifying the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press—implied an unprecedented opportunity for creative expression in Western culture.

It cannot be overstated that when Whitman began his career, the United States was still a stumbling, backwater nation in more ways than one.  The Revolution generation was just dying off, and the next wave, with a median age under 18, were just beginning to imagine how the principles enshrined in the Constitution might actually apply to people other than privileged, white men.  Against this backdrop, Buinicki places Whitman as a critic of America’s timidity in plodding toward adoption of international copyright, suggesting an unwillingness to compete with the more developed nations of the world.  Picking up on Whitman’s sentiments, Buinicki writes …

“The American bard does not thrive by squelching competition but by meeting it openly and generously. Monopoly, on the other hand, suggests selfishness, and its true evil is that, since it is paired with secrecy, it precludes fair and open participation, even if that participation comes in the form of market competition.”

Citing clear examples in both Whitman’s poetry and his correspondences with various publishers, Buinicki demonstrates how the author recognized that the true threat of monopoly lay in the capacity of the predatory entity to act in secret—to exploit without permission.  What mattered to Whitman—as it matters to nearly all creators today—was to be asked, and not exclusively for the purpose of payment.

For Whitman, who articulated, and insisted upon, a metaphysical connection linking himself, his work, and his readers, copyright was an extension of that nexus rather than a barrier to it.  While the modern copyright skeptic seeks to limit originality in the author by over-emphasizing the commons of creative consciousness, Whitman synthesized these forces in his poetry and his copyright advocacy.  “Whitman exploited all means available, including the legal means offered through copyright, to make each copy of the book embody the personal exchange he called for in his poetry,” Buinicki writes.

The passage of the international copyright law did not result in publishing monopolies, a reduction in authorship, or outsized costs to consumers. To the contrary, by ending the piratical American trade in foreign manuscripts, international copyright law had the predicted effect of stimulating investment in American authors, thus opening the door to the US not only out-producing most countries in creative authorship, but also to making creative work one of the nation’s most lucrative and most salutary exports.  Hence, Buinicki’s conclusion says it best …

“Whitman’s support for the passage of an international copyright law in the US … was more than a matter of simply protecting his business interests: it was inextricably linked to his idea of an equal, open, and connected democracy.”

Walt Whitman Championed Democracy and Fought for Copyright – Part I

(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series)

“Publishers move without concert, harmony, or agreement. There is no law to regulate their rights, and they have none (which are respected) by courtesy.  They print the same book, and the spirit of competition is such as to destroy all correctness, all taste, and all chance of profit.  The result is, that the author gets nothing, the publisher is subjected to losses, and the public are never satisfied.  An international copyright law would remove these evils.”

 — Nahum Capen, 1844 —

This excerpt from a Memorial written by a notable Boston author, editor, and publisher fairly well sums up the state of book publishing—and most creative work—in the embryonic America of the mid-19th century. It is not mere coincidence that the evolution of an American artistic voice parallels the development of U.S. copyright law; and the passage of an international copyright statute in 1891 was a key milestone—culturally, economically, creatively, and politically—in the nation’s progress toward global maturity.  One important advocate of that law also happened to be one of the nation’s first truly domestic creative voices—the poet Walt Whitman, who viewed the adoption of international copyright as a matter of democratic principle even more than a matter of economic purpose.

Creativity today is entirely democratic.  We understand that works of great genius and value might come from anywhere.  But many of America’s most influential authors and thinkers, during the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, believed that literature should remain tethered to classical, elitist traditions.  Thus, while American copyright law evolved throughout the 19th century, charting a course distinct from the antecedents of English common law, a new American creative voice was emerging at the same time.  Indeed, there was a conscious, creative/political movement that may be roughly bracketed between an 1837 speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the literary apotheosis expressed in Whitman’s Leaves of Grassin 1855.

It was August 31, 1837, when Emerson spoke to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University in which he called upon young, domestic authors to write the narrative of the new nation rather than to continue to “feed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”  Emerson’s address helped galvanize a broad, cultural shift that was just percolating among the first post-Revolution, literary figures in the nation, and among these was Whitman, who published his first short stories in a new periodical founded on the principles of this movement—the United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

Whitman was a colleague of the Young Americans—they were contemporaries of other literary- nationalist movements in Europe—who had intentionally set out to democratize literary work as an essential ingredient to democratizing America itself.  Although the policy views of these young Democrats are too myriad, factional, and contradictory to synthesize in this short essay, the one consistent belief of the Young Americans was that culture and literature should not be authored solely by the nation’s aristocratic, Anglo conservatives.  Whitman was, therefore, a key figure in America’s first clash of generations, with younger authors insisting that the American voice must become far more diverse than works steeped in European traditions and flowing from Puritan epicenters like Harvard and Yale.

Capen’s observations about the state of publishing was contemporaneous with early debates on international copyright, which the independent American book publishers successfully opposed for decades, primarily by asserting that the law would give the larger printing firms monopoly control over all publishing.  In truth, most American publishers of all sizes were accustomed to the trade in copies of European—mostly English—books without license, and Capen’s Memorial also notes that that these volumes tended to be cheaply made products with flawed pages and weak bindings (i.e. disposable).  Hence, American rejection of international copyright throughout most of its first century had the twin effect of disenfranchising foreign authors from the American market while simultaneously retarding investment in domestic authors and a domestic publishing industry.

When Charles Dickens toured America in 1842 and advocated that the U.S. adopt international copyright, he was scorned by many, including in several editorials that forecast today’s digital-age critics of copyright.  In fact, it was the founding editor of the Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, who broke rank with his literary colleagues by opposing international copyright in an 1843 editorial, in which he said of Dickens, “He has certainly been richly enough paid at home, in pecuniary rewards as well as in public honor, for what he has done, to leave him but slender ground on which to ask a return of mere volunteer generosity on our part for the pleasure his admirable writings have afforded us.”

O’Sullivan acknowledged the same article that his opposition to an international copyright law was contrary to the beliefs of his fellow authors, and this included Whitman, who had earlier written a defense of Dickens (nicknamed Boz) in the Evening Tattler.   Although critical of Dickens’s alleged (and it turns out inaccurately reported) haughty tone toward the Americans, Whitman wrote, “Let Boz—ungrateful as he has proved himself—let him be treated fairly.  He no doubt came over here with the main purpose of effecting an international copyright:  we are among those who believe that a law to that effect would be wise and righteous.”

Whitman self-published Leaves of Grassin 1855, carving a new, egalitarian, domestic verse out of a long walk through New York City, filled with industry, sweat, agony, pathos, and sex.  Literally and metaphorically a response to Emerson’s call to “sing” the song of the young nation, it begins with the democratic vow …

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

One might think the symbiotic relationship between author and reader inherent to those words—and indeed evident throughout Whitman’s poetry—would be anathema to a passionate defense of copyright.  But in fact, Whitman promoted the cause of international copyright throughout his career—his first article supporting the law was published more than a decade before he published Leaves of Grass—viewing the principle primarily as an expression of moral and democratic values and, therefore, consistent with the literary aspirations of Young America. He just barely lived to witness the law’s passage in 1891, about which he wrote…

“We have our international copyright at last—the bill is signed today. The United States, which should have been the first to pass the thing, is the last. Now all civilized nations have it. It is a question of honesty—of morals—of a literature, in fact. I know it will be said by some—Here, now, how is it that you, Walt Whitman, author of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ are in favor of such a thing? Ought the world not to own the world in common? Well, when others do, we will, too. This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.”

American Literature Professor Martin Buinicki of Valparaiso University, in an article published in 2003, seeks to harmonize Whitman’s democratic ideals, his writing, his relationship to the independent publishers of the period, and his advocacy of copyright. “Taken at face value,” Buinicki writes, “Whitman’s careful tending of his copyrights appears not only to contradict his democratic declarations but also to trouble his bold assertions of artistic independence:  by scrupulously protecting his copyrights …”

In Part II of this post, I’ll expand on why that “face value” assumption is incorrect and why Whitman, therefore, serves as a foil to many assumptions made by copyright critics about the motives of authors.

Fool me once, shame on Facebook …

In several posts on the subject of Facebook and fake news, I have opined that if we users are going to believe and disseminate bogus information, that’s mostly an us problem, one which Facebook likely cannot solve. In that spirit, there is an extent to which I agree with Mike Masnick’s Techdirt post on May 2 calling Facebook’s plans to rank news sources according to trustworthiness a “bad idea.” At least I agree with Masnick that a human flaw like confirmation bias is a “hell of a drug,” which cannot be counteracted by whatever algorithmic wizardry Zuckerberg & Team may devise.

But other than conceding that people are imperfect, subjective beings, and therefore susceptible to false information, I disagree with the rationale Masnick seems to apply in his critique of Facebook’s plans. He writes, “…as with the lack of an objective definition of ‘bad,’ you’ve got the same problem with ‘trust.’ For example, I sure don’t trust ‘the system’ that Zuckerberg mentions…to do a particularly good job of determining which news sources are trustworthy.”

Perhaps that’s just wordplay, but I find Masnick’s allusion to the subjectivity of trust to be symptomatic of the same populist affliction that precipitated the post-truth world in which we now live. I had hoped that the moment we elected a president who openly lies on Twitter, that this might at least serve as a clear and profound rebuttal to the cyber-utopian mantra that everything—including journalism—needed disrupting. Because if trustworthiness in news is not, on some level, objectively quantifiable, then all journalism must devolve to the exigencies of confirmation bias.

A functioning and humane democratic society depends on limits to democracy itself—on deference to expertise based on certain objective criteria to decide when that deference has been earned. It is essential that a reporter write, This Thing Happened—or even Here’s Why This Matters—and that a plurality of reasonable people accept the report as reliable based on objective (if subtle) metrics. Years of experience, background, track record, tone and style, and, yes, the organization a reporter works for should all factor into this assessment. So, I reject the proposal that “trust” is nearly so subjective as “bad” in this context. The integrity of a news report is not a matter of taste. Yet, Masnick writes …

“Facebook should never be the arbiter of truth, no matter how much people push it to be. Instead, it can and should be providing tools for its users to have more control. Let them create better filters. Let them apply their own “trust” metrics, or share trust metrics that others create.”

Call me a curmudgeon, but how is “applying one’s own trust metrics” any different from the same confirmation bias problem that social media tends to exacerbate in the first place? Masnick’s solution appears to be more confirmation bias, resembling the cliché that insists “more speech is the only solution to bad speech.” If that premise was ever true (and I have my doubts), it has been obliterated by the phenomenon of social media where more is often the enemy of reason.

Masnick is right, of course, that users who like Infowars are going to respond negatively if Facebook ranks that platform as less trustworthy than The New York Times or Wall Street Journal; but that’s a business problem for Facebook—one I could care less about because Infowars IS objectively less trustworthy than those news sources. And lest anyone think that’s liberal bias talking, I’ll say the same thing about Occupy Democrats or any of the other non-news sources my friends link to all the time.

These platforms don’t deserve equal footing with actual journalism, and if Facebook wants to rank news sources, fine. Whatever. I’m probably as skeptical as Masnick that it will do much good in the grand scheme of public discourse, but I think he exaggerates when he calls Facebook an “arbiter of truth.” This sounds more like the blogger who tends to oppose platform responsibility full stop than a complaint about what Facebook is doing wrong in grappling with its role as a conduit of news. In fact, it’s hard to fathom exactly what Masnick proposes as a solution when he writes, “The answer isn’t to force Facebook to police all bad stuff, it should be to move back towards a system where information is more distributed, and we’re not pressured into certain content because that same Facebook thinks it will lead to the most ‘engagement.’”

That reads like the suggestion is Facebook should not be Facebook, which is probably a non-starter as far as the shareholders are concerned. Instead, I tend to think that Facebook should be recognized for the flawed, highly-manipulated, walled-garden it is and placed in its proper context—as an activity to be moderated like video gaming or junk food. Because with or without rankings, we really have no idea what the psychological effect is of just scrolling past images and headlines that trigger dozens of subconscious emotional responses in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, to the extent that Facebook remains a source of news and information, if ranking means I’ll encounter The Daily Beast more often than The Daily Democrat, I’ll count that as a win.