use this for the current event due next class

While the internet is indeed a powerful tool, and many of those most affected by the content industry’s effort us it regularly, I don’t see this as an “internet community” issue. I personally know more than a few people who protested (signed petitions, called, whatever) who use the internet rarely or not at all. Because in the end, it wasn’t even really about the internet, much less “piracy”. One does not even have to use a tool to be appalled by abuse of power or crony capitalism.

One error that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg fell into, in her Eldred and Golan opinions, was that of assuming that the increasing span of copyright over time justified no limits to copyright, that it simply made invalid the expressed reservations of the Framers. It was essentially the same error that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had fallen into in 1857. They both mistook a cancer for a natural growth.

If you look at Benjamin Franklin, Printer, of Philadelphia, the kind of printing press he had was substantially the same as the printing presses which Gutenberg and the Englishman William Caxton had in the fifteenth century. That is, it was a wooden table, with an overhead beam, and a massive helical screw thread. The press came with a quantity of lead type, which Franklin knew how to cast. Printers set type by picking letters out of a many-compartmented box with a tweezers and placing them in a composing stick. Franklin used his own press to be his own author, editor, and publisher, printing newspapers and books. It wasn’t quite like having a blog, but it was close.

What happened after Franklin was that the primal press was superseded by a rotary steam-powered press. Type was eventually cast, not by hand, but with a Linotype. Printing became capital-intensive, dominated by a new kind of princely newspaper owner, someone like James Gordon Bennett. Writers wrote things, and submitted them, and sub-editors, working from the owner’s general directives, decided whether or not to publish these things. The pieces which were approved were taken to the composing room, and set in type, which was fitted into giant pages. The flat type chaises were used to steam-cast cardboard mats, which were then fitted into curved molds, and used to cast curved lead plates which would be fitted into the drums of a rotary press. It was Fordism, basically. This was the technological condition in which copyright got extended over and over again.

When movies came along, the production process was basically similar to the newspaper production process in its industrial orientation, naturally hierarchical and authoritarian. Resistance to copyright developed as new technology began to take writers and publishers back towards the technological conditions of Benjamin Franklin.

As I noted previously, the instructive analogy is that of slavery. The first blacks arrived in Virginia in 1619, sold by an English ship whose crew did not want to answer questions. Recent research indicates that they were pirates who had captured a Portuguese slave ship, carrying slaves from Angola to Brazil, but this was not known at the time. The Virginians placed the blacks in indentured servitude, on the same basis as white indentured servants, that is, they had to work seven years to gain their freedom, and an essential kit of tools to set up on their own. However, over the course of the next couple of decades, the blacks gradually became slaves outright. However, through the eighteenth century, slaves tended to escape to the frontier, and to be absorbed by the white frontiersmen. This was the situation on the eve of the American Revolution.

There is an interesting book, T.H. Breen’s _Tobacco Culture_, which explores the economic mentality of those of the Founding Fathers who came from the South, people like George Washington. Slaves were primarily used to grow export crops, and the most notable of these crops was tobacco. In the 1760’s, George Washington was learning by experience just how unprofitable tobacco growing was. A planter could work ever so hard– and still wind up deeper in debt to a London merchant. Washington was expressing ideas similar to the “dependency theory” of the German-American-Chilean Marxist economist Andre Gunder Frank in the 1970’s. One contributing factor to the American Revolution in the South was that it meant a debt holiday for distressed planters. Whatever they owed in 1776, it was not until about 1790 that they were obliged to pay up. Washington’s critique of tobacco implied that slavery, apart from being unjust, was an economic mistake. The question was how to disentangle oneself from the mistake, and the Founding Fathers were leaning towards a gradual system. The importation of slaves was to cease after 1808, and arrangements would somehow be made to free and/or resettle the slaves who were already here. The expectation was that as more free settlers came from Europe, and no more slaves were brought in, it would eventually be feasible to simply absorb the blacks, in the way that this was happening in the territory which would become West Virginia.

However, a few years later, Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin. Cotton, which had previously been uneconomic, went through a boom, based on slave labor. The smuggling of slaves into the country became rampant. Ordinary white men in the South, people like the Lincoln family decided that they could not live with slavery. When slaves provided the labor, providing the labor became something that slaves did, and ordinary white men, who worked with their hands, were increasingly likely to be treated like slaves. So they left, to Ohio, or Indiana, or Illinois. From 1820 onwards, there was a gathering crisis between slave and free states. The problem was that slaves felt the same way as the Lincoln family. They tended to escape across the Ohio River, or the Mason-Dixon line. The slaveholders of the South demanded increasingly drastic measures to prevent this, such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In response, ordinary white men, who felt they had shared economic interests with the slaves, formed resistance organizations such as the Underground Railroad.

The last straw was the Dred Scott case, in 1857. As the servant of an Army officer, Dred Scott had worked for years in the North, in Minnesota, and claimed his freedom on that basis. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, rejected Scott’s claim, and ruled, in effect, that all the states of the North were slave states. Taney was a Marylander. At the time, slavery was collapsing economically in Maryland. Maryland farmers were shifting to crops which did not require field labor, and, according to their natures, were either freeing their slaves, or “selling them south,” that is, shipping them down to the “cotton belt” of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Baltimore was increasingly full of free blacks, who were setting up as small businessmen of one kind or another: barbers, cab drivers, street vendors, and so on. In Taney’s decision, there was an element of desperately attempting to uphold the collapsing social order around him. Of course, what happened was not the restoration of slavery, but the path to war. John Brown in Kansas, the Harpers Ferry raid, the election of Lincoln, the Confederate Secession, the Battle of Shiloh, and the Battle of Gettysburg. In the end, on the top of Little Round Top Hill, on July 2, 1863, slavery, as represented by troops from Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas, would be confronted by the 20th Maine Regiment, commanded by Col. Joshua Chamberlain, a peacetime college professor.