Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Jerry Campbell, Duke University

...all human beings have a right to knowledg; that knowledge, like freedom, is not a commodity to be bought and sold...what we refer to as scholarly knowledge should be placed in the public domain at its origin; made as easily and freely available to all as we can make it.

It is not surprising that most of our energy is directed toward getting necessary things done. Neither is it surprising that our agendas are, for the most part, set for us by the natural flow of business. I do not mean to suggest that we have no control over the nature of our work or that we do not occasionally exercise such control. Yet, I do believe that from day to day we spend most of our time engaging ongoing issues that have originated elsewhere and that often pertain to larger matters. This circumstance, I believe, prompts us most often to adopt responsive and practical courses of action -- a "taking care of business" approach. Neither do I intend to call this approach into question by making these observations. Taking care of business is a good thing. A responsive and practical approach is necessary if we are to keep complex organizations up to date and viable.

I do intend to suggest, however, that there are exceptional occasions when our typical, responsive approach is inadequate. From time to time, we encounter issues of such fundamental significance that they deserve our full intellectual attention and something more than a normal, practical response. And I wish to argue that, in the emerging digital information environment, copyright is such an issue.

While necessary in the meantime, our practical responses to copyright have suffered two inescapable defects. On the one hand, they have been largely defensive. I think it would be fair to say that we and the larger academic community (excepting EDUCOM and perhaps the Association of American University Presses) would be pleased to see the current situation as reflected in the 1976 copyright law and its fair use provision continue. We were not among those initially arguing that the law should be reviewed for the purpose of better adapting it to the digital environment. Even though prompted by others, such a review demanded our attention once it was initiated. Since copyright defines many of the legal boundaries that govern the actions of libraries, involvement in the debate became at once a matter of defending and preserving certain practices that the library community had come to depend upon. We were automatically cast in a defensive mode.

On the other hand, our responses have been characterized by self-interest. By definition, most defensive actions represent self-interest. The potential revisions in the copyright law have been in the debate phase, and this debate will continue until the matter is settled by Congress. Debate requires that each participant present its own view of the matter, their self-interest. Publishers argue for a solution that guarantees the best economic advantage to copyright holders; librarians argue for an environment that enables the most flexibility for sharing and using information; technologists lobby for an environment in which the technology itself will flourish regardless of the consequences for commerce or access.

However necessary they may be, I characterize our defensive and self-interested responses as defective because they lack something akin to moral high-ground. They are not undergirded by a larger, nobler purpose that places our copyright discussions in a conceptual framework, that provides them with both meaning and context. In such a circumstance, we are more or less just asking legislators to choose sides, to determine from their own biases whose self-interests to affirm. We are in need, therefore, of a deeper foundation, a first principle, if you will, from which to settle the copyright debate.

I offer that such a first principle is simply this, that all human beings have a right to knowledge; that knowledge, like freedom, is not a commodity to be bought and sold; that what we refer to as scholarly knowledge should be placed in the public domain at its origin; made as easily and freely available to all as we can make it. I acknowledge that the statement of such a principle, a right to knowledge as a basic human right, sounds preposterous. Indeed, in the context of current culture, it sounds both preposterous and impossible. And I have to remind myself how preposterous it must have sounded in the late 18th century for a relatively small group of people to assert that all men had certain unalienable rights that included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Achieving a full definition of human rights is unfinished. It is a process for the ages where concessions are won slowly and sometimes at great cost -- most often at the expense of power and wealth. This, of course, explains why it is the work of centuries.

Public education is a step in the direction of enabling the individual's right to knowledge, but it stops short of achieving the goal. While the problems of public education are many and complex, one key problem is the inability of schools at all levels to afford access to knowledge. At a time in our cultural evolution when we are aware of the debilitating role of ignorance in human civilizations, it is at best baffling and at worst self destructive that we trade knowledge as a commodity, that we hold knowledge ransom for cash to those who can pay for it, and that we do so in spite of the human suffering, often on a grand scale, that results.

Indeed, the right to knowledge is so fundamental a right that it is prerequisite to other basic rights -- like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The concepts upon which all these basic rights are based depend upon a certain prerequisite knowledge. We might hypothesize that giving knowledge away, making certain that every human being has access to some quintessential database of the learnings of human civilizations, would dramatically enrich and improve the human condition in myriad ways, that it would bring a bounty that far exceeds its cost.

In its origins, copyright was a mechanism to stimulate the production and dissemination of knowledge. It did so by providing an incentive to copyright holders through the granting of a limited monopoly. With the new technologies at hand, however, copyright has actually begun to function as a inhibitor to the production and dissemination of knowledge. Because of the sometimes exaggerated cost of information, it is certainly no longer necessary to provide such a monopolistic incentive.

Copyright, therefore, is a concept whose time is past. It has outlived its usefulness. We now have at our disposal the technology to fulfill the promise of extending the most basic human right, the right to knowledge, to all cultures and individuals. And we have the opportunity and the responsibility to argue that knowledge should be withdrawn from use as a commercial commodity and that the intellectual tyranny imposed by its buying and selling be ended.

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