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Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

Current Events, Rhetoric, and the Domain of Copyright

Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 1:30 PM ET

Dear Jim,

Well, I knew that would be the problem in the beginning. It was why I was not elected president of the Current Events Club. I just don't dig breaking news as much as other people do or, I know, as I should. When I agreed to do these conversations, I knew I would be letting one side down by not being entertaining or clever. But it's kind of late for that, at least for me. And I don't have "opinions" on most things anymore, anyway. My view of the "New Jerusalem" (the subject of Correlli Barnett's first chapter in The Audit of War) is not so clear as it used to be. Still, I've been trying. I picked up the Los Angeles Times this morning saying, "Now, Rich, you are going to be witty and sophisticated this morning just like all those other breakfast conversations. Look at the front page and sparkle!" So there's a left-hand column on motivational speakers and all the money they make. I might have done a strong line in that sort of thing myself, but somehow I never could stomach it. Still, I can't discuss that because, why cause offense? People do need to be inspired and cajoled, and if other folks can make a good thing out of it, what's it to me? Then there's an article on the closing of the Chinatown subway stop in New York for repairs. It is a parable of political influence, I'm told (the Chinese presumably not having enough). Well, if I can't jiggle my bag of spleen about that, what hope is left for me? "Mississippi Voters Favor Rebel Flag." Well, what next? "Israel Seizes Land in Gaza"? I long ago stopped thinking I'd ever be entitled to an opinion about that part of the world. Colin Powell goes "Tut, Tut," and the Wall Street Journal editorial goes "Tut, Tut" to Colin Powell, and I'm willing to leave it at that. Yahoo! has hired Terry Semel, who used to run Warner Bros., to save its bacon. Well, everyone thinks that the entertainment business has the secret of life nowadays (my pal Alex Singer brokered a deal between Paramount and the U.S. Army, and now U.S.C. has a $50 million institute to tell the Army how to make their training entertaining.) Well, an interesting topic, to be sure, but not one that would light O'Donnell's fire. And I don't think that the entertainment business does have the secret of life, either. So, I'm a flop, I think, at this breakfast conversation business.

So back to your morning note. You say, "Isn't it odd that we haven't found ways to create content-independent systems of inculcating the skills (of high literacy)?" But isn't that what "rhetoric" has always been about? Its content independence is what bugged Plato's Socrates, after all. And there I am, you see, back with the dead white males. Honestly.

On to copyright for a minute or two and then I'll stop, since I must be bumping my head up against the 500-word limit. You've hit the heart of the mystery in copyright these days. Digital information systems vastly extend the domain of copyright. In an economics of attention, everyone wants to own the cultural conversation because that's where the value is added. This makes things really scary, especially for people like us, since the cultural conversation is where we live and breathe. But at the same time, digital expression undermines the basic operating premises of copyright law, book-based as it is. I develop this argument at some length in a forthcoming piece in the Houston Law Review ("Barbie and the Teacher of Righteousness: Two Studies in the Economics of Attention"). I'll send you an off-print, but don't worry, I wrote it as a television script for a lawyer talk show with Barbie as the central character, so it may even make you laugh. It is all about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which ought to be more up your street than mine.

By the way, and then I'll stop, next year when I'm doing the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar lectures, I'm going to offer one on an undergraduate course in copyright. What do you think about such a proposition?

Talk to you later,
Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

Current Events, Rhetoric, and the Domain of Copyright

Posted Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 1:30 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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