25. If you believe in IP, how do you teach others? November 16, 2009.
Some Harvard professors are taking very seriously their intellectual property rights and have
claimed copyright to the ideas that they spread in their classrooms. What prompted this was
a website in which students posted their notes to help other students. The professors have
have cracked down. It might have been enough to legislate against this behavior in particular.
Instead, they wrapped their objection in the great fallacy of our age. The professor owns
his ideas, and they may not be spread without his permission. This action has opened up
a can of worms, and now other universities have taken up the puzzling question, how do
Do you at once enforce intellectual property and uphold the ideal of a university, which
is, after all, about teaching and spreading ideas to others?
The problem is a serious one that highlights the absurdity of the notion that an idea,
infinitely reproducible and thereby not scarce, and also taught with the overt purpose of
gaining adherence among students, can be somehow contained and restrained once it is unleashed.
The only way to retain exclusive possession of an idea is never to share it with anyone.
But of course that not only cuts against the grain of teaching, it is contrary to the human
impulse for bouncing ideas off others and still claiming some credit for innovation.
There are two possible ways out of this problem in a digital age, open source or IP.
The open source model has been adopted by MIT, which has made its entire curriculum
open source and freely available online.
This is a fairly straightforward approach, which finally gets down to the reality that
what MIT is charging for is not so much the education, but the degree itself, clarity
at last.
Another approach is the one taken by Harvard and, most explicitly, by the University of
of Texas, which has suggested that professors make the following contract with students.
My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law.
They are my own, original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver
them in order to secure protection.
Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class, thereby creating a derivative work
from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own
You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else, or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.
You can make no other use of what you learn? Really? That sort of smashes the whole point of education, doesn't it?
The goal of the university is to spread knowledge, not to grant one-time use for what you learn in the classroom.
The aim of an individual student is to gain knowledge that is used in every possible way
for a lifetime, and to pass the ideas on to others.
In fact, what the contract requires is impossible.
It is not as if our bodies are equipped with hard drives that can be wiped clean after
the semester is over.
In any case, even if we were so equipped, that would defeat the whole purpose of taking
I don't find this struggle ridiculous in the slightest.
Once you posit the ownership of ideas already made public, this problem becomes inevitable.
Of course the institution of teaching has been around since the ancient world, and yet
this issue has never really presented itself before.
But since the publishing mercantilists first asserted that property rights could be applied
The problem of what to do about teaching has been waiting in the wings.
The advent of digital media forces the issue because ideas, once stated, can spread globally
in an instant.
I am further struck by this problem in light of a fantastic new book on Ayn Rand called
Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns.
The author isn't quite zeroed in on this issue as such, but she provides enough information
to document the fact that for Rand the issue of her intellectual property became increasingly
important throughout her life.
She documents how Rand's royalties from her work, Night of January 16th, gave her the
first taste of financial independence, and how she later came to believe that she had
not received enough.
With each successive negotiation for book royalties and film rights, her terms became
Now, in a free market, there is nothing wrong with an upfront payment for first-run rights to a book or movie.
It is by being first past the post that profits are made.
This was how artists were paid in the Renaissance, not through royalties, as if the artist owns the image or work,
but through a payment that comes with granting some third party the opportunity to be the first to reveal the work.
In the 19th century, for example, British authors would sell their manuscripts to American publishers who could not copyright the work.
There was no such thing as international copyright in those days.
It turned out that the authors made more money through this means of payment than through royalties in their own country.
So on this score, Rand had perfectly sound instincts. A person should charge as much as he or she can for first run, but Rand's rationale was rooted in this modern notion of intellectual property, a theory shared by nearly all her contemporaries on which she was never once challenged.
In fact, to a great extent, her philosophy exalted the role and rights of the Creator
more than any, probably in the history of ideas.
This is a great contribution, but she took the notion too far.
For Rand, intellectual rights trumped real rights.
This comes through not only in her writings.
The fountainhead can be given a property rights spin, but ultimately it is about intellectual
Here, property and her ideas became a source of conflict with friends such as Isabel Patterson,
with whom Rand was friends for many years.
Tensions entered into the friendship when Rand accused Patterson of taking her ideas
in the writing of God of the Machine.
Patterson responded that Rand's contribution to the ideas in this book was minimal.
The distribution to the ideas in this book was minimal. They wrote back and forth and argued over specific instances of who said what to whom. They sorted through events in their associations attempting to reconstruct them and divvy the ideas.
In truth, what had happened to Rand and Patterson is called a conversation.
One person says something and another elaborates which prompts new thoughts, new directions, new comments, a consensus, which then gets interrupted by new thoughts, points of departure, new elaborations, a new consensus, and so on.
And if you know how Rand was, staying up all night in these detailed discussions of theory, you know that it would be simply impossible to sort out who owned what.
You can try this yourself with a friend. Talk for 15 minutes and then attempt to draw an ownership map of ideas. See if you can come to a consensus. Then see what the attempt does to your friendship.
Reading through the history of Rand's relationships with people, we find that this dynamic was pervasive.
Again, I'm not saying this as accusation, but merely observing that it is an extension
of her theory concerning the ownership of ideas.
This is particularly a problem for a theory of life that exalts independent thinking and
creativity.
What if the idea that one should be independent and creative itself actually came from someone
else?
One must constantly acknowledge one's debts.
and, moreover, one should be cautious about remixing the ideas, lest the property right
in the idea of being creative be stained and marred.
Marrying the idea of intellectual property to the notion of being independent generates
extreme dependence and mandatory intellectual compliance.
The famed role of Nathaniel Brandon in the Rand Circle was not to be only a teacher of
He was caught on the horns of a dilemma in many ways.
On the one hand, he was seeking followers for Rand's ideas.
On the other hand, he wanted to protect her ideas from being stolen.
He probably wanted to maintain his own monopolistic possession of them.
What kind of person, then, are you willing to tolerate as part of the inner circle?
It would have to be a person who would repeat the ideas of Rand exactly, without alteration,
and constantly cite Rand for her innovation, and assert her right to the idea.
Taken far enough, one can imagine the result.
A drone army of people who footnoted nearly every phrase coming out of their mouths.
It was in the pursuit of intellectual property that Nathaniel intervened in objectivist clubs
to prevent them from using the word objectivist, to prevent them from using quotes from John
Galt, to prevent them even from advertising lectures on the topic by students of her ideas.
As Burns demonstrates, but without clarity of casual explanation, the movement for Rand's
Rand's ideas only really took off after Nathaniel Brandon had been cast out of the inner circle.
The monopoly on her ideas could no longer be maintained. They were set free, not fully
open source, but at least far less restricted. And so they flourished.
Rand was not entirely happy about this transition. Her impression was not entirely invalid that
Rand was having a huge influence.
Like the professors discussed above, however, she turned away from an open source model
toward IP enforcement.
Of the Libertarian Party, for example, she wrote, it's a bad sign for an allegedly pro-capitalist
party to start by stealing ideas.
But this raises the question.
Would it have been better had the libertarians not been influenced by Rand?
From her perspective, yes.
It was even worse when ideas were stolen and then mixed with ideas with which she disagreed.
The rest of the story played out as we might expect.
She ended up feeling robbed and looted by everyone who was influenced by her.
My own reading of her biography is that her belief that her ideas were property led to
She might have been proud of her role as one of the most influential intellectual forces
in the second half of the twentieth century. Lacking any university position and a professorship,
she actually managed to make the whole of the English-speaking world her classroom.
But rather than be thrilled at what she had done, she had the opposite reaction, which
Which is exactly what one might expect from a deeply flawed conception of intellectual
property.
What Rand went through is precisely what these Harvard professors are going through, deep
ambiguity concerning the application of property rights to their thoughts.
Eventually, they will have to come to terms with it.
It is the MIT model, or retirement from teaching, or a lifetime of bitterness.
The MIT model is the model of the ancient world and every university environment ever
since, and it is the only way to deal with a digital society in which every thought becomes
is globalized upon utterance.