[Books] Title: COMMON AS AIR, By Lewis Hyde - 306 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
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Review: A Republic of Letters
Robert Darnton | NY Times | August 20, 2010
Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde’s “Common as Air,” an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests. The history that Hyde invokes goes back to the Middle Ages, when villagers enjoyed collective rights to common lands, but for the most part it is situated in the era of the founding fathers. Hyde invokes the founders in order to warn us against a new enclosure movement, one that would fence off large sectors of the public domain — in science, the arts, literature, and the entire world of knowledge — in order to exploit monopolies. He cites plenty of examples from Hollywood, the pharmaceutical industry, agribusiness, and the swarm of lobbyists who transform public knowledge into private preserves by manipulating laws for the protection of intellectual property. Then he draws on Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Madison for arguments against such privatization.
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He shows that Franklin did not tame lightning in Promethean fashion, all alone, by directing his solitary genius at the heavens. Franklin actually collaborated with three other experimenters in a common laboratory set up in the Pennsylvania State House. He also applied information derived from earlier theorists and experimenters, including William Harvey, Isaac Newton, the inventors of the Leyden jar, and many wits who had noticed the similarity between electric sparks and lightning.
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Complete review: nytimes.com
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