McCain: Invent, Or Else
One of the things I hate most about discussions on today’s “energy crisis” is how so many people take inventions and men’s ideas for granted. For example, when the issue of today’s gas prices comes up, it won’t be long until someone says that “we” need to think of a better energy alternatives. Everybody has an opinion of what those alternatives *should* be — wind, solar, ethanol, etc — but that’s about as far as their thinking will go. When it comes to researching and implementing their ideas, they pass. Leave that for the guys who know more, right? All they know is, the idea is good, it hasn’t been put in place yet, so something’s wrong. And for some, the solution is for someone (like the government) is to just make the good idea finally happen.
While driving from home tonight, I heard one of the worst examples of this on the radio. And no surprise, it was from John McCain. Today he gave a speech detailing how he thinks we can get through this crisis. His solution: Make the smart people figure it out! According to McCain:
Higher end auto companies like BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes employ some of the best engineering talent in the world. But that talent isn’t put to the job of fuel efficiency, when the penalties are too small to encourage innovation.
Here he’s pushing the idea that we have a lot of smart people who could solve our energy problems… if they were just put on that task. They’re not, though, so McCain continued:
But I am confident they can do more, and do it faster, in the interest of our energy security. And if I am elected president, they will. Whether it takes a meeting with automakers during my first month in office, or my signature on an act of Congress, we will meet the goal of a swift conversion of American vehicles away from oil.
In other words, the smart people could solve our problems but they’re not, so I’m going to make them do it.
The problem with this isn’t just that McCain wants to use government force to make people behave a certain way, which is already bad enough. He also thinks that “we,” as people that happen to live in the same country as so many inventors, somehow played a part in those inventions. And by taking action against the people that make the things that we need and enjoy, “we” will solve our problems. To reinforce this idea, he later says (emphasis mine):
Think of all the highest scientific endeavors of our age — the invention of the silicon chip, the creation of the Internet, the mapping of the human genome. In so many cases, you can draw a straight line back to American inventors, and often to the foresighted aid of the United States government.
So according to McCain, the inventions he mentions was not just a product of the inventor; they were also a product of us either providing aid or “incentive” (like a signature on an act from Congress) for their work. Want more inventions? Vote McCain, 2008!
Politicians don’t produce anything, individuals do. An individual thinks of the idea, an individual chooses to act on that idea, and the an individual does the work to make the product. If we want to foster that process, the best thing we can do is stay out of their way. And to take it one step further, if we want to be free to live our own lives we must respect those inventors by staying out of their rights. And to take it even one more step further, if we really admire inventors and producers for what they offer, we won’t feel resentment toward them.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people really don’t admire or respect the people that bring about the things we enjoy. They want the results of their work, but they don’t think they should have to meet their “arbitrary” demands. I think Ayn Rand put it very well in Atlas Shrugged (emphasis mine):
Tags: [atlas shrugged, mccain]If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world—stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover—ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube—then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them.
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McCain, Fox News, and “Fair Use”
A copyright infringement argument has sprung up between John McCain and Fox News recently. On a Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News, John McCain had a sharp criticism of Hillary Clinton’s attempt to give $1 million of taxpayer dollars to a Woodstock museum. McCain had the following to say about Woodstock:
I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.
That’s pretty funny, and I laughed when I heard it. McCain quickly took the 25-30 seconds of the debate video and made a presidential ad out of it. In response, Fox News issued a cease-and-desist letter to McCain’s office, telling him that he was not allowed to use Fox’s coverage for his presidential ad. McCain used the clip anyway, and now many groups with wildly different views on politics have come together to denounce Fox for trying to stop McCain from using their clip. Mitt Romney even made it a point to inform Fox News that he’s going to use their footage without their persmission. Most of the criticism leveled against Fox seems to be centered around the idea of “fair use.” Since the video clip shown was so short (30 seconds out of a 90+ minute debate), it was not shown for commercial purposes, and because the clip contains information an issue that is very important to our society, Fox News should not be able to stop McCain from showing the clip.
I agree that McCain has not violated Fox News’ copyright, but I don’t agree with most of the arguments I’ve heard against Fox. This is not easy for me to explain, but I’ll try now.
I believe that Fox News is the rightful owner of the debate video that was broadcast on its network, and Fox is well within its rights to stop any action that prevents it from exercising its control over its intellectual property. The “2007 Republican Presidential Debate hosted by Fox News” (or whatever it is called) is a piece of property created and owned by Fox News, and if you want to use that property you have to get Fox’s permission. So how can I say McCain to use a clip of that video without Fox’s permission? One sentence in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal completely changed the way I saw intellectual property, and I think it might make this issue easier to understand:
The inheritance of material property represents a dynamic claim on a static amount of wealth; the inheritance of intellectual property represents a static claim on a dynamic process of production.
Since owning material property is to possess control over something that exists, an owner of material property can cut that property up and still claim rights over every piece. For example, if you own a stick of butter and you cut it in half, you now own two half-sticks of butter. Your property right is claim on a specific piece of property, and by splitting it you merely changed the makeup of the object that you already own. Intellectual property cannot be cut up in the same way, however. An owner of a piece of intellectual property cannot necessarily cut up that property and then claim the same ownership rights over the pieces as he or she does on the whole. For example, an author cannot take one sentence out of a copyrighted book and claim to own the right over that sentence based on his copyright over the entire book. Ownership of a piece of intellectual property is the abilty to control the production of that property. Taking small bits out of a copyrighted work, like McCain did when he took the 30 second clip from Fox’s debate, does not harm Fox’s ability to control its property. Fox owns the publication rights of the debate, but it does not own the publication rights over every single word that was uttered on that tape.
This is not a limitation of copyright; it’s the definition of copyright. To own a copyright on a work is to own the copyright on that work, not every word or note that makes up the work. Many people think that the taking the concept of copyright to the “extreme” means that intellectual property owners will be able to stop anyone from seeing, hearing, or even talking about that content without explicit permission from the owner, but that’s not the truth. Copyright covers works created by individuals, and that’s all. Did McCain’s 30-second clip infringe on Fox’s ownership of the 90-minute debate? No.
Or did I, for that matter, violate the copyrights owned by the estate of Ayn Rand when I posted one sentence she wrote. No, I did not. Imagine what blogging would turn into if single sentences could be copyrighted!
I think this type of confusion about copyright comes from the backwards way that people often view copyright. Instead of treating copyright as the way to protect an individual’s creation, people treat it as a set of restrictions on what an individual can do. I think the latter approach lends itself to the idea that there has to be some “fair” balance between complete restrictions and no restrictions. Rights cannot be balanced, though. The only valid question is whether Fox has the right to control that clip.
I see one valid way for Fox to stop presidential candidates from using its video like this. All it has to do is make presidential candidates agree not to use the video in anyway in exchange for a spot on the debate. It wouldn’t stop people like you or me from using clips, but it would have given Fox a valid argument to use against McCain.
Tags: [copyright, fair use, fox news, intellectual property, mccain]